This is my first foray into wearable electronics. It is a sound activated hat. There is a microphone below the bill of the hat that picks up the voice of the wearer as well as ambient noise. The sound is converted to light using a small board sewn into the back of the hat. The light patterns in the animated image to the left are random flashes triggered by sound. The intensity of each flash varies with sound level.
Most of the material used was purchased from Adafruit. The microphone is their MAX4466 microphone amplifier. The controller is a an Adafruit Gemma, and the lights are NeoPixel digital RGB LED’s on a strips. The LED’s are individually addressable which makes it possible program very complex patterns using just one pin on the Gemma board. I chose the randoms flashes for this project, but more informative light responses to sound could be used. In fact, after I completed this project, I found a very similar sound responsive baseball cap on Adafruit’s website. The sound/light relationship in their project shows a more informative equalizer pattern.
Electret Microphone Amplifier – MAX4466 with Adjustable Gain: Add an ear to your project with this well-designed electret microphone amplifier. This fully assembled and tested board comes with a 20-20KHz electret microphone soldered on. For the amplification, we use the Maxim MAX4466, an op-amp specifically designed for this delicate task! The amplifier has excellent power supply noise rejection, so this amplifier sounds really good and isn’t nearly as noisy or scratchy as other mic amp breakouts we’ve tried! Read more.
Adafruit NeoPixel Digital RGB LED Strip – White 30 LED – WHITE: You thought it couldn’t get better than our world-famous 32-LED-per-meter Digital LED strip but we will prove you wrong! These NeoPixel strips have 30 digitally-addressable pixel LEDs per meter and are very affordable and are only 12.5 mm wide, 10 mm if you remove the strip from the casing. Read more.
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!
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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.
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!