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Light-up LED Dress for Halloween

My niece wanted to be a princess for Halloween so I made her a light-up RGB LED dress

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This is a RGB LED light-up dress I made for my niece for Halloween 2016 as she wanted to be a princess and I wanted to make her something magical. Nearly everyone who saw it while trick-or-treating had a reaction to it.

I used 5050 RGB LED strips, a simple 12VDC regulator, and Ryobi 18V cordless tools lithium ion battery to make the LED dress.

How-to article can be found on my website here: http://lukeskaff.com/diy-light-up-led-dress/

Video: 

GIF: https://gfycat.com/DimwittedAncientDarwinsfox 

  • 1 × White Dress
  • 1 × Petticoat / undershirt
  • 1 × 5050 RGB LED strip
  • 1 × IR RGB LED strip controller
  • 1 × Ryobi Powertool Battery

View all 6 components

  • 1
    Full build instructions are on my website

    Full LED Dress how-to instructions from my blog

  • 2
    LED Mounting

    The 5050 RGB LED strips are mounted to a peiticoat / underskirt to allow the dress to be washed, modular, and to "poof" out the dress for extra effect.  The LEDs are mounted facing inward to make a diffused glow and so the dress will not have point light sources.

  • 3
    Power supply

    For the power regular I used a super overkill cheap 240W step down buck power supply I found on amazon.  I wanted something fully enclosed, waterproof, low heat, for piece of mind against arcing or overheating.  There is probably a much better potted or fully enclosed low cost solution out there and would like to see what others recommend.  There are a ton of low cost buck regulators on ebay but I have not seen good options for ones that are potted. 

View all 4 instructions

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Discussions

Radu Motisan wrote 10/31/2017 at 20:03 point

awesome, my little girl would love this too

  Are you sure? yes | no

Winston wrote 10/04/2017 at 13:43 point

I'm seeing multiple LED strip Halloween outfits and am hoping that people doing this are using inline fuses or some other overcurrent protection methods to prevent arcs/sparks and possible resulting garment fires from the low internal resistance batteries being used. Perhaps the Ryobi Powertool Battery has internal protection for that? I see others just using multi-cell lipos. 

  Are you sure? yes | no

Luke Skaff wrote 10/04/2017 at 14:33 point

Winston, that is a good idea for a cheap added safety feature.  I will add a fast blow low current fuse after the power supply.

  Are you sure? yes | no

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