Jacket Night Light - Wearables Leds

Built this set of lights for my kids to use when we go walk the dog at night.

In our area there is plenty of bicycles, skaters and electric bicycles and electric scooter, having the kids with some lighting on their clothing makes safer for them to walk freely around at night plus it looks cool with their friends.

• Lithium Ion Polymer Battery - 3.7v 500mAh
•  Adafruit GEMMA v2
• LilyPad LED Colors
• Lilypad Conductive Thread Bobbin
• Superglue / glue anything to protect and main the stiches separated

First you need to think about the location and design of the led's, meaning that if you want the kids to use it better look nice, otherwise you will find your self forcing them to use the wearables.

I settle for 3 simple leds, 2 of the color white on the hood and one in red color in the back, this one is actually only visible if the hood is over the head, looked a good a idea but then I discovered that the kids where actually where not really using the hood as much so it was a waste of a led...live and learn.

Also consider where the board and the battery will be stored, this should be in a protected location, inside pocket or something, I was lucky since I used a waterproof jacket that had a upper front exterior pocket.

Sewing time!

You need to be careful when with the path you sew your wire, you need to take into account the wire will be loaded with electric current negative/positive, therefore you need to take into account that the wires can't cross otherwise you will have a short circuit.

The amount of voltage in the circuit is not dangerous but a short circuit could damage your board or make the lights work in a weird way.

You can see on the picture in red the path I use for the positive and in black for the negative, again take special account to not leave the thread to lose otherwise when the jacket moves it wires will cross and...short circuit could occurs.

As expected one wire will have to be connected to the negative and the other to the positive.

With this wire is not easy to tie the knots, so what I found that works for me is to make multiple loops to secure a good connection to the connector on the Leds, and to the connector on the board.

Additionally I notice that when I cut the wire it would start to unthread itself, so I put a little drop of glue make it more stable and secure.

Make sure to decide to which of the outputs pins you want to sew the wires, taking into account what kind of effects you want to user you might user only on output or multiple (using multiples means you will have to sew multiple wires)

When you decide what kind of effects you want to use its codding time, here there is multiple examples around to use and or adapt.

In my case I decided to have a blink / fade behavior to it.

The txt attached contains the full code I used, if it helps.

Enjoy, if anything the kids love the fact that no one else as jackets with light :D