Beautiful NeoPixel Prom Dress From 17-year-old Claire Smith #WearableWednesday
Beautiful DIY NeoPixel Prom Dress from Claire Smith – nicely done! Via Mashable
She loves fashion and coding. So when prom season came around, she had the perfect idea for a DIY dress.
Last year, the world was awed by Zac Posen’s light-up Met Gala dress for Claire Danes. Among its fans was 17-year-old Claire Smith, a homeschooled high school senior and budding engineer from Maryland. Smith was inspired by Posen’s dress and decided to try to make her own version.
Smith started coding two years ago at Girls Who Code’s Summer Immersion Program, and has since participated in hackathons and worked on her own projects to learn more. When time came for an upcoming home school senior prom, Smith decided to modify a dress she got for free from a community organization called Cinderella’s Closet.
Smith used Adafruit’s Flora—a wearable electronics platform—and combined it with six NeoPixels, which are tiny LEDs that work with Flora. She stitched them onto the dress and connected them using conductive thread. It even features a battery pack stitched into the skirt, which she can use to turn the lights on and off…
…The project took Smith just a few days to make. She’s now starting her own club and doing a workshop to teach other girls how use 3D printers. Smith encourages all girls who are interested in science or engineering to pursue it.
“If you’re thinking of going into computer science, don’t back out because the guys are intimidating, just keep going,” she said. “It’s an amazing journey to go through.”
We couldn’t agree more Claire! See more of the dress here.
Featured Adafruit Product!
FLORA – Wearable electronic platform: Arduino-compatible – v3: FLORA is Adafruit’s fully-featured wearable electronics platform. It’s a round, sewable, Arduino-compatible microcontroller designed to empower amazing wearables projects.FLORA comes with Adafruit’s support, tutorials and projects. Check out dozens of FLORA tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System, with more added all the time! 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!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
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!