In 2018, I got the idea to start tinkering with electronics after seeing a demo of accelerometer-powered LED wings that a friend had made his wife for a concert. I’d always felt a little intimidated by the hobbyist electronics market, but after getting introduced to Adafruit: https://learn.adafruit.com/ and seeing how accessible everything was now, I decided to take the plunge and build an audio-reactive hoodie
One of the biggest challenges I ended up running into was trying to debug the code in conjunction to the hardware, including:
- Realizing that the 5 volt power coming from my USB cable wasn’t enough to power the LEDs I had chosen
- Working with the smaller boards meant I had to now work within the limitation on onboard RAM, so I had to pick and choose the debug statements that were most important
After several days of debugging the prototype, I had finally assembled the full thing, where I took it to a concert and it became a hit among my friends!
Full video of the final product can be found here:
I’ve since completed several other projects, including:
A custom-built keyboard
A Ragnaros-themed LED hat that I wore for Blizzcon
A Christmas-themed Ork Great Hall with a flashing red and green LED strip that also plays “Jingle Bells” off the onboard speaker. I’ve since used this project as a piece of terrain in my Warhammer: 40,000 games!
Links to the code for all of which can be found here:
Kirsten Kane 