While I was brainstorming for The Mugs music video I am doing this summer, I came up with an idea for using a wearable LED shirt (and patch) in a key scene of the video. I had wanted to experiment with wearable technology this summer anyway, so it was a great opportunity to put it right into action.

The scenes of the video involves illustrating several people dying (conceptually both physically and digitally). The two types of dying would be signified with different patterns of the LEDs: the rotating cycle of LEDs would represent an “initial death” phase (which would be the physical part of us) and the pulsing LEDs that then stops completely would represent the “full death” phase (which would be the digital part of us).

The songs lyrics dealt with the challenges (mental and physical) of maintaining a long distance relationship, and how modern technology provides us wires, sound bytes, and digital windows of loved ones, which are at times pleasing, but never truly satisfies our deep human desire to be close to another person. In the video, I wanted to recognize this difference in love, personal relationships, and life (the living) by providing some form of digital reading mechanism that revealed our dying selves to the world (i.e. blinking LEDs).

I used the LilyPad Arduino, some LEDs made to be sewn into clothing, and conductive thread. I discovered I need to practice sewing more often. I did an initial test run using clips, and then drew a sample thread path from the battery pack (which I placed in the lower trim of the shirt) to the LilyPad and the LEDs (on the left breast pocket of the shirt). The test went well so I went ahead with sewing the shirt first. I drew outlines of where I wanted the path of the conductive thread to follow, and then went to work.

Here is a video sample of the initial trial with clips (just to make sure the code and the LEDs were working) as well as the test of the shirt once everything was sewn in:

After getting the shirt set-up, I went to work on the patch. I wanted to make sure that I had options during filming on who could wear the actual LEDs, so the LED patch made the most sense. I wanted that extra flexibility during filming in case I needed to add another person to the scene, and not have to have everyone wearing the same shirt.

I used a spiral pattern on this one for placing the common ground, and this seemed to work better than my “wild-style” grounding on the shirt. Not as many issues with conductive thread crossings. Here is a successful test of the patch, illustrating both patters (rotating and blinking into submission):

This was all programmed in Arduino, and here are links to the code:
Rotating LEDs (link to code)
Blinking to nothing, 10 blinks and then nothing (link to code)