Bright Wearables: Adding LEDs to Everyday Clothing and Accessories

Programmable LEDs add playfulness, variety and visual appeal to clothing and accessories, but designing durable illuminated clothing that looks natural can be a challenge. This talk will cover tricks I've found useful in creating LED wearables including belts, bags, and even a fiber-optic dress.

What inspired you to begin investigating your topic or inspired you to make your project?:
One of my first Arduino projects was using a LilyPad and conductive thread to create a multiplexed LED matrix t-shirt capable of scrolling messages and playing pong. That got me hooked on the potential of wearables as both fashion and engineering challenge. The flexible and unstructured nature of clothing presents a challenge as a framework for electronics, but the reward of conquering that challenge is to be able to take and display your crafts and programming wherever you go. With the advent of smaller, faster and more powerful micro controllers and programmable LED strips, I've worked to design projects embedding both decorative and reactive LED strips in designs that don't necessarily look like tech until you turn them on.