Another cool wearables project from Adafruit Director of Wearable Electronics and MAKE alum Becky Stern. In this design, Becky is showing off the capabilities of Adafruit’s FLORA wearable color sensor. She’s sewn it into a circuit with a FLORA microcontroller and 12 FLORA RGB LEDs, on a ruffled scarf designed to diffuse the light and give a softer effect.
MAKE contributor Andy has created a great tutorial to introduce you to the utility of “Charlieplexing,” a method for controlling multiple LEDs without the use of multiple microcontroller pins. With charlieplexing you can turn on or off one LED at a time. To light more than one LED at a time, you can scan the LEDs by turning a sequence of them on and off really fast.
Instructables user Lorenzo M put together a new tutorial for making these unique LED earrings with no soldering required!
On May 14-15 this year, hopeful innovators and industry experts will gather at MAKE’s Hardware Innovation Workshop. One of the hopefuls will be self-described artist, designer, photographer, scientist, and engineer Joshua Hubert. Josh and others will have a chance to showcase their creations and pitch them in a five minute presentation and demonstration. Workshop attendees will vote for the most interesting and innovative product idea, taking into consideration its application, target market, and commercial viability. The winner will receive a slot on the Maker Faire Innovation Stage to present their prototype the following weekend.
Joshua specializes in creating some of the most amazing illuminated art you are likely to see. He has consulted on many fascinating designs for television, film and stage, including Katy Perry’s peacock costume from your 2010 appearance on David Letterman.
Number four in our daily line-up of Hardware Innovation Workshop prototype contest entries is the LumiGeek LED4DIY family of RGB LED control shields. LumiGeek recently made a big splash, online, for their part in the collaboration (with Autodesk engineers Arthur Harsuvanakit and Evan Atherton) that produced this beautiful one-off 3D-printed sound/light reactive speaker set:
Light up a room just by walking in—and I mean literally—with this light up sparkle skirt tutorial from Becky Stern!
Give your paper crafts a fun electronic upgrade with this LED origami tutorial!
