1. What does it do and how does it work?
This dress has led lights on it that pulse to sounds around it. A microphone in the back of the dress picks up sound, which signals the lights to turn on and off making the lights flash to the sounds around it. The middle two panels light up to different volumes than the outer two panels on the dress to mimic the layers in the music or sound surrounding the dress.
This dress has a hand dyed skirt and the wire is hand stitched onto the dress
2. Overall
I am really happy with my project overall. This is the first time that I have ever done anything with programming and my dress turned our better than my original plan. The process was frustrating because I would think that I would have everything programmed correctly and stitched correctly, but when I would plug it in it wouldn’t work. After working through all the programming problems, I am happy with my project.
3. Largest Hurdles
The largest hurdles I encountered was when I found out that using the EL wire was not going to work with my microphone. Once we found out that I couldn’t use the EL wire I had to change my design, but I think it changed for the better. The next largest hurdle was making sure that there weren’t any shorts causing the dress to light up. Lastly the largest hurdle was picking the right volume to have the lights respond to.
4. How well did your project meet your original project description and goals
The final dress is a completely different design from my original description. Originally I wanted to have a dress that had EL wire outlining the silhouette and two different style lines.
As the class time went on I decided that i wanted to have a sensor that would make the dress respond to sound. When I tried to hook up the EL wire up to the microphone, the microphone wouldn’t work. Therefore I had to scrap the EL wire and just use strands of LEDs.
The only thing that remained the same was lights on a dress. I think as the semester went on I realized that I could do more with programming that I thought I could. The final project ended up being more interesting and interactive than my original design so I am very happy with it.
5. If I had more time
If I had more time I would experiment putting lights under the skirt fabric so you would only see the lights when they would light up. I would have also liked to program each panel separately so that each panel would respond to different volumes. I would also like to experiment with ties and bow ties for guys.