• Step 1: Make the LED strips

    phoenix perry • 06/08/2016 at 09:06 • 0 comments

    Step one of this project was to create an LED Strip. I'm working with this skirt

    The idea is to sew the leds into the gathers of the fabric. I am using neopixels for this project and an adafruit flora. As well, the project will run off a lipo battery that has 3.7V and 1200mAh of current. If you do the math for the components, you have the ability to use about 20 of the Neopixels with this setup.

    The problem is that I want to also use a little sound sensor so I am working on the assumption that will need some voltage and current too. Plus, I'm bound to have some current loss because of the wires and the length of the skirt. The sound sensor is an electret Mic Amp, the MAX4466. It has a current draw of about 24-48 microamps per amp. That's great news because that's basically very small indeed! 1 microamp is .001 milliamps! It's nearly free. It'll draw some voltage too. The data sheet is here but for now, I'm going to avoid actual math and just hack at it. I'll use 17 LEDs and hope that'll work out. If I fail, multimeter & calculator time!

    https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/MAX4465-MAX4469.pdf

    First things first was to create the LED chain. I cut the wires in roughly the right lengths and got to soldering. I also sealed the solder joints with hot glue to stabilize my solder joint. I might add more glue if things break during the test run.

    So far, they are working.

    Now I'm just waiting for the skirt to arrive in the mail and then I'll need to add the rest of the circuit.