Are you a teacher on a budget looking for a programmable light-up system your students can use at home and keep for their own projects? Or maybe you want an inexpensive, simple way to incorporate lights and a microcontroller into your wearables permanently. Here’s a quick and easy solution — perfect for Halloween, cosplay, or just making outfits that really stand out!
This guide will show you how to use a Gemma M0 microcontroller and “fairy lights” — a strand of one-color LEDs strung along a lovely silver wire that can be bent to hold its shape — to add lights to wearables and decorations.
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.
