Light Suit

Why build a light suit? Probably because I've watched tron a few too many times (the 1984 version of course). I'd just discovered arduino and was very excited, I'd made LED's flash and buzzers sound but now I wanted to make something new and interesting, the idea of a light suit popped into my mind. A quick glance round the internet showed me that many people much more skilled than me had made amazing tron inspired clothing especially with the advent of the new film but then the idea of a motion sensitive light suit hit me couldnt find any thing like that online and so this project was born. I've made a proper instructable as Luziviech asked for it!

First of all its a suit so I just used black jogging bottoms and a black long sleeved t-shirt as a base.

lots of LEDs i just hacked open lights from torchs and fairy lights from poundland

Battery packs from the torchs

Breadiuno

Accelerometer ADXL 335

Darlington pair chip

Computer clip

lots of triple AA's for the leds and a 9v battery for the arduino

I started by attaching the LEDs on the shirt, the top half has 3 groups: left arm, right arm and chest. Each group three separately controlled sets of lights.

The trousers have a single group with again threes sets of lights one set with 2 super bright panels and some fairy lights and the two sets with only fairy lights.

The panel lights where simply glue gun glued down (I love my glue gun, as you will see!). The fairy lights LEDs had to have their legs bent to make sure they pointed out from the suit, and then they were also glue gunned down. Pity my poor friend Bedford at this point he had to wear the top as I glued LEDs onto the top to make sure they pointed the rights way, glue gun glue is hot and he has the burns to prove it.

The batterys for the LEDs are in cases which Velcro into the pockets of the trousers to stop them falling out when you move around. The Velcro strips where glue gunned into the pockets and onto the case.

To connect the electronics of the trousers and shirt I used an 24 pin computer cable with male and female connecters and cut it in half.I attached one half to the shirt and one half to the trousers. These halfs were attached with my glue gun.

Next I attached the motion sensor to the shirt, on the back, between the shoulder blades.

I then soldered wire to all of the LEDs, the pins of two connecter halves and the motion sensor. The battery cases and LEDs on the trousers where wired to pins on the computer cable connecter. Each set shared a positive and negative pin thus each set only required two pins. The battery cases also shared a pin for their positive and negative wire effectively wiring them in parallel. The wires on the shirt were all brought to the center of the back to be attached the the breaduino and the Darlington pairs.

A breaduino pin was used for each set of lights, each pin was connected to the input pin for the Darlington pairs chip. The output pin was then connected to the positive wires for the LED sets. The ground pin of the arduino was connected to the Darlington pair and the negative wires of the LEDs and batterys. The motion sensors ground pin was wired to this common ground and then its x,y and z outputs were connected to the analogue inputs of the breaduino. Its power input was soldered to the 5v output on the breaduino.

this is the arduino sketch which runs it all

And here it is in action, i havent had much sleep in this vid and am pretty enthusiastic!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=S5FqsL6LB2A

Thanks to bedford  for his help building and programming, to the massive arduino communtity out there making things like this possible for layman like me and dave for his awesome dancing!

How you liked it let me know if you have questions or have built something related.

Will