Motion Triggered Neopixel RGB Shoes!

NeoPixel's are awesome we can control hundreds of lights with 3 wires i.e. 5V, Din & GND and in this tutorial, I'll show how you can make Motion Triggered NeoPixel RGB Shoes!

So without any further ado lets get started.

Materials:

1. Vibration Sensor Module (One I am using is a DIY version You can check my previous post for that Here)
2. Arduino Nano
3. WS2812B Neopixel LEDs

Tools:

1. Soldering Iron
2. Solder wire
3. Helping Hands
4. Hot Glue

Once you have all the material, we can start building firstly I took the shoes and started measuring out how much LEDs I can fit around the shoe, for me it was 44 LEDs. So I cut the 2 pairs of LED strip each with 44 LEDs now using some hot glue, I glued them around the shoe make sure you start from behind so we can connect wires later on.

After gluing LEDs around the shoe, It was time to work on some Electronics, I took two 18650 Li-ion cells and placed them in these tiny black spacer which is optional you can use some tape to hold them together, These cells are 4.2V each so Now we will connect them in series to form 8.4 volt battery pack for which I used soldering Iron and a nickel strip you can also solder a small piece of wire, now connect the +ve end of the battery to Vin pin of Arduino Nano and –Ve end of the battery to GND of Arduino this will directly power the Arduino nano using batteries, At the moment I don’t have a switch so I just cut of Ground cable and later I’ll just twist the wires for power the system.

Once that is done, take the Vibration sensor and solder one of its lead to 5V of Arduino and other to Digital Pin 2 of Arduino, Now that is complete take your shoes and connect 5V to 5V GND to GND and Din pin of LEDs to Digital pin 13 of Arduino Similarly, I repeated this process for other shoe and that’s all we have to do for electronics.

Note: Sensor I'm using is DIY version or Similar to this one by Adafruit

If you use want to use Vibration Sensor Module Like this one you can, Just note those have 3 pins, connect Vcc to 5V, GND to GND and Do(Digital Output) to Digital Pin 13 of Arduino. Using a potentiometer on that module you can adjust the sensitivity of your trigger.

Now it’s time for uploading the code to our Arduino while uploading the code just change and enter the number of LEDs You have on your shoes for me it’s 44 LEDs, so just change that and upload the code to both the Arduino!

After successful uploading of code, you can give a small tap to the sensor to make sure it works and as you can see it works flawlessly, now you can use some hot glue to fix the Arduino on the batteries and then using some double side tape (Or use Velcro) I fixed the batteries behind the shoes and this project was complete!

You can download code from below!

Note: You need to install Adafruit Neopixel Library

Congratulations you did it! Now you can be a nerd and still rock the floor with these awesome shoes!

So that's pretty much it for this tutorial guys, If you like my work consider checking out my YouTube channel for more awesome stuff: https://www.youtube.com/NematicsLab
You can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter, etc for upcoming projects

https://www.facebook.com/NematicsLab/

https://www.instagram.com/NematicsLab/

https://twitter.com/NematicsLab