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Life on an LED Shirt

nym | 01:02 PM
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Leah Buechley loves LEDs. With the help of Nwanua Elumeze, she just created a new shirt that plays the game of life, and this one looks really slick. This shirt has a button as well to interact with the shirt. How soon can it be until some major manufactuer picks up on this girl?
Leah has sewn 140 LEDs onto the shirt in a tight grid pattern, using a needle and conductive thread. Each row connects back to the AVR Microcontroller that runs the show. Coded with the language C, this computer chip performs the rules of life and updates the display. If you want to learn how to make your own fabric based light-grid, Leah has full instructions on her site.

Nwanua joined in on the project by adding more interactivity with his drawing device. He created software for his PDA (Palm Zire) that interfaces with the user and the shirt. Infrared light transmits the data, one bit at a time, to the shirt's reciever. He wrote his part in C with help from prc-tools, a free-to-use communication protocol that lets the PDA's infrared port talk to the crystal-less, funky-time clock in the reciever.

See the videos of this in action here and here.

Previous link: LED Tank Top

[ via we make money not art ]

Comments

interesting her work is progressing... I like the addition of software... next step... passive gathering of information to be converted to data about the surroundings the shirt is in... perhaps analog sensor data... maybe accelerometers, say... for instance.. that would be sweet... interactivity... semi-robotic display... inspiring... I am certain... nice link! :)
ps: or perhaps bio-monitors!! that would be neat... led output modulated via bio-rythmic "information"...

Posted by: personal at February 15, 2006 05:39 PM
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