Illuminated, Interactive ‘Skirt Full of Stars’ – Part 1

Hooray, Hooray – it’s finally done!

Introducing my ‘Skirt Full of Stars’ – an interactive, illuminated skirt using the Lilypad Arduino – a microcontroller board designed for textile use.  The skirt incorporates an accelerometer to measure the wearer’s movement, and the ‘stars’ change color based on that movement.

I’ve been working on this skirt for around a year now – you may remember the video I posted last spring of my proof of concept circuit. In the time since then I’ve created two other prototype skirts, which were great steps in my learning but didn’t end up working quite as I’d hoped. This one, however, made it though a full real-world test wear at last week’s Bassnectar concert with flying, or at least dancing, colors.

Here’s what that circuit from the video ended up turning into:

And here it is showing a different color as I move the accelerometer:

I sewed the circuit into a handmade tulle wrap skirt, then attached fiber optics to each of the LEDs and wove them through the lower layer of tulle.

I’m hoping to get some better pictures and some video of it this weekend, so stay tuned for more details.