I went to Burning Man in 2010 for the first time and knew I had to have some lights at night as it can be really dark out on the playa. So I bought some EL-wire and attached it to the side of my trousers while I was there. I thought it would be really cool, until I actually went out during the night and found out everybody had EL-wire attached to their clothes.
For Burning Man 2011 I needed something way cooler. So after doing some research I decided to build an RGB LED suit. I found a factory in China that actually sold addressable modules that had 3 5050 smd LED’s on them and that would enable you to control these modules individually, something I wanted to be able to do for a long time.
After an exciting period of waiting if my shipment would actually arrive I was happy to find a box in the mail full of modules.
I decided to use an Arduino to control the LED’s and found a great library called the Fast SPI library by Daniel Garcia. The library is fast enough to drive the 200 modules I wanted use.
Due to to limited amount of SRAM in the Arduino Nano (2Kb) coding the controlling software was quite a challenge as the three levels of color per LED take up 1 bit each so that sums up to 3bits x 200 modules = 600 bytes just to store the current state of the LED’s.
Another issue was storing the patterns in SRAM. I created a two dimensional array to map the number of the LED module to it’s physical location on my clothes. The Flash library by Mikal Hart allows you to use flash memory (PROGMEM) and read it when you need to in an easy way, so that saved me quite a bit of SRAM space.
I first build a prototype of the hardware:
Prototype of the RGB LED controller, using a Boarduino.
I added an LCDisplay and some buttons so I would be able to navigate thru the different patterns I coded and added an MSGEQ7 IC and a microphone. The MSGEQ7 chip is a seven-band audio spectrum analyzer chip. You just pulse a reset pin and then clock out seven analog values that correspond the spectral content in seven bands.
As the LED’s would be all over my body I created a controller what would be mounted to the back of my hand.
So here is another picture of both the prototype and the pcb’s of the hardware I build:
The control panel for the suit
Prototype and build pcb's
Controller inside enclosure
Prototyping the pants
I took the suit to the CCC camp to beta test it but forgot the controller so I rewrote the software while I was there to show a rainbow pattern.
I was surprised that I had no issues bringing the LED suit and the battery packs on a plane
to the states did not give me any questions at airport security.
I programmed quite a lot of patterns for the suit, most of them speed and color adjustable:
- a vertical scan pattern, going up or down or up/down (see video below)
- random fading up and down
- white sparks on/of random also
- rainbow (see video below)
- a special pattern that I can trigger when someone shakes my hand that makes my suit start to glow from that hand to the rest of my body
The reactions to the suit were amazing I had so many people wanting to take a picture with me or just thanking me for the suit. Using the pattern with the handshake to thank them back was alot of fun, seeing the amazement in their eyes 
Here is me in my suit at Burning Man 2011:
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That’s way cool… Do you have any footage of your LED handshake?
Thanks! Yes, sort of, look at the beginning of this video:
http://vimeo.com/33689838
Hi, would you mind somehow linking to those LED pixels? They look aces – so is it 3 rgb leds in one module? I’ve seen those about, but I’ve always thought they were r, g and b, respectively, making them “circus out” a bit.
cheers.
i’m interested in these LED pixels too. how many volts and amps did each one pull? how many batteries did you have in your pockets?
The Arduino runs on 12V and if all leds are off the drivers consume about 600mA. When the LEDS are at full brightness they consume about 1.5 Amps. I had 2 li-ion packs with me.
Awesome suit! I’m going to be trying something with a similar amount of LEDs. What kind of battery packs did you use? I can only seem to find li-on ones specifically for laptops!
I bought them at dealextreme.com, the strongest 12v packs they have. Don’t take their amp ratings serious, they are not as strong as advertised. looking forward to see your creation!
How do you think the tesla coil was affecting the patterns on the suit? Was it just the sound on the spectrum analyzer or something else?
I’m not sure but I think the Tesla coil is emitting a really strong AM signal.
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Hey, I remember meeting you on the playa and being impressed with your suit. I’m glad I found my way to this post, I’ve been looking for you on the web with no success.
I’ve been playing with my own version of this using Chris DeVries’ SPI library as a starting point, but I’m really just getting started. Here’s a youtube of what I’ve got so far: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8EDhxrtGJc
Hi Ralph, how great that you did manage to find me in the end. Finding people you meet on the playa can be really hard!
You suit looks great, look forward to see what patterns you come up with! You’re leaving the back of your suit
dark?
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Hey Sander, this suit is by far one of the best models I’ve seen out there. I’m really wanting to build one for this upcoming voodoo fest in NoLa. Do you think you could take the time to show me parts list and steps to build one? I’ve been reading over the steps you state in the blog, I’m just not there in the electronics dept. Seriously rad suit though. ghbollinger@yahoo.com really hope to speak with you soon.
Thanks for your comment. I send you an email.
Hi Sander,
I didn’t make it to the Playa but attend Burning Flipside quite a bit. I love your suit concept and have been wanting to build similar LED nets for costumes and holiday displays. I’ve been looking for reasonably priced smart LED’s. Could you share your parts sources? I can write the Arduino code with external SRAM storage but would love to see how you wrote your mapping functions versus display functions. Would you be willing to share your code? Thanks for sharing your project.
michael@michael-morlan.net
Michael
Hi Michael,
Sorry for the late reply, I was on holiday and forgot about your post. I got the LED’s via alibaba.com.
My code is still quite messy so I don’t think sharing would help you very much but the mapping is quite
easy. Write a two dimensional array where you map out the position of the LED’s. This is required as the
string of LED’s will be going up and down your clothes and thus if you would like to address all the LED’s
at the bottom of your pants you need the numbers of the LED’s at that location. That is where the array
comes in handy. Ones you have mapped the LED’s in the array you can go over it in a loop and turn all the
LED’s on/off to get an up/down pattern of light as displayed in one of my video’s.
Hope this helps. Your work on your site looks great!
Kind regards,
Sander
Rocking! I saw you there. I had my own suit with 250 LEDs.
http://anthrolume.wordpress.com
See you next year!
I missed this year but was there last year and the year before. Just took a look at your site, amazing suit and great writeup! So what’s up for 3.0?