So my hat was planned to be structured around its ability to assist in taking photos and also being used as a vu meter for party occasions. Hence the music mullet name (business in the front, party in the back).
Adafruit was awesome and sent us 5 neopixels for our projects. I however wanted to use quite a bit more on my hat.
I want to push for around 60 LEDs on my hat (could change depending on memory available on the GEMMA) so sewing and/or soldering four connections on each pixel seemed a little daunting. Luckily adafruit sells them in strips with various LED densities, shapes and LED chips.
My prerequisite for the LEDs is that they only use 1 pin for data communication. This is important as the gemma only has 3 i/o pins we can use for sensors/leds/buttons. I had a strip of LPD6803 LED strip that uses two pins for communication, leaving me with only 1 pin for sensors and such which wouldn’t work.
I settled on a strip of WS2811 LEDs which uses 1 wire for communication and also has a higher colour resolution than the lpd6803
(the above is the adafruit ws2801 LED pixels but the ones I ordered look similar. Mine has 3 wires instead of four)
The nice thing about LED pixels such as these is that they have 4 little pieces of rubber that stick out at their base which helps secure them when they are pushed through the right sized hole.
This makes things significantly easier if you have a large amount of LEDs you need to work with.
You can see the little plastic pieces above.
Until they arrive I’ll be using the LPD6803 LEDs to test brightness and placement on the hat.
In my next post i'll be talking about photography and the use of LEDs 