Since I posted a link to our Halloween LED suit and promised updates, I figured I would add a post here in off topic for that purpose. Right now the suit is run on an arduino but I may end up controlling with a FEZ Domino for USB host support. The air joystick works using the normal joystick class so it may be cool to add a USB joystick suit blaster - freegin easy thanks to you guys. The hardest part is I have some pretty complex C++ stuff happening that has to be ported to run FEZ only. I may just cheat and use I2C to have the FEZ read the joystick / other device and send the commands to the arduino. Seeing how there is only 30 shopping days left and I think that robot may want some pants - have to set priorities.
In any event - sometimes powering a suit like this can be 1/2 the battle. Last year our prototype 20 LED suit was tossed together using a 12v lithium ion battery and a 12V inverter - not very efficient. This year we updated the system to use the same 12v battery but instead we used 4 1.2 amp 5v car chargers. No heat and the solution seems to be working well. A small 12v battery powers the suit for an hour on full bright color cycle. It runs longer when playing with the music as the brightness bounces and hence uses less power in the troughs. The battery charges in 30 minutes - so this is the best weight / price / performance power solution I have found yet but open if someone has ideas :).
Here is a video of this years suit finally going mobile with power and microphone.
We are still coming up with a name. With only 30 shopping days left until Halloween we may have to resort to something simple like - “hey, can you turn that down” man
This looks fun… I like the part when you have your Bro test it first (didn’t short cirtuit or something)… then you test it… I’m guilty of that too.
Nice work.
There is currently 70 LEDs in this suit. Last night we decided that “HCYTTD” Man needs some pants so we may end up with 100 LEDs or so by Halloween.
We added a waist and a belt to the LED suit. We also added a Wii classic controller due to needing a ton of buttons and having the interface for that already completed. We also ended up using an arduino for this due to the fact that all the advanced stand alone options and on board music control responses are written in that environment. The stuff I have been doing with the FEZ is primarily for computer controlled project, will have to port over the stand alone stuff to FEZ at some point.
We also have the suit a name - EQ.
I removed bad video of the suit and replaced below with a link that shows the suit itself - without the drunk bad dancer included, lol.
I agree the dancing in the video is bad, my brother can dance better than that but he was really drunk to his defense. To programmers defense I’ll have to put on the suit and get a video of me cutting up the rug
