As a middle school engineering teacher, my students do musical light-up projects with Arduino every semester. I fell in love with e-textiles and so I make an ugly Christmas sweater with wearable tech each year, and after last year’s I found this video from Mark Schreiber that really made me want to add “real” music to mine instead of just a piezo buzzer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gej3jrI68rA One of my favorite Christmas songs is “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey, so I dreamed of a sweater that would play this particular song and light up. I planned early and got a LilyPad MP3 player, my LilyPad SimpleSnap Arduino, and a sheet of Flora Neopixels from Adafruit. The Neopixels are so, so cool. They are super bright and you can attach as many as you want to a single Arduino pin. They are very easy to program. Just enchanting. I want to use them on everything!
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.