Professor Kills It With Colorful Tech Brain Dress #WearableWednesday
Marlene Behrmann, Cowan Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University, recently received the honor of being inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. Of course there was the question of what to wear for the ceremony, and Marlene decided to design her own dress resembling the brain, with the help of costume maker, Sophie Hood. Marlene started with the fabric creating a design with images of her own brain showing the sulci and gyri, and had it printed through Spoonflower, an online design service. Sophie worked on the design and also integrated the electronics.
The dress uses a Lilypad Arduino microcontroller teamed up with LED sequins and a microphone. The parts are concealed by ruched pieces of fabric, which add to the white matter and gray matter design. The finished dress reacts to sound, which fits nicely with the brain theme. It’s a fun piece, and you can check out more information on the project’s site. I’m curious whether Marlene realizes that we have the ability to make mind controlled dresses. Someone needs to buy her a NeuroSky headset! For those that want to get Marlene’s look, we have the perfect tutorial for a wearable that reacts to sound. Check out our LED Masquerade Masks that will twinkle based on the sound in the room. This is an easy project that you can do with a pre-made mask, or get crafty and design your own. Every day is perfect for a mask.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.