LED Jacket – 02: Rather a good copy, than a bad replica.

Posted on by Hendrik

Before I started to precise my project requirements I looked for other people and their implementations. I found more than I expected!

Moritz Waldemeyer

Will.I.Am’s Video Jacket

The most interesting result for me was Moritz Waldemeyer. He is a famous artist of light and has worked with many great people of fashion industry. He created lots of different forms of glowing or interactive clothing and furniture.

Moritz Waldermeyer is born in Germany and grew up bilingual. He studied electrical engineering and has his studio in London wherefrom he travels all around the world for his jobs. One of them was to upgrade a handcrafted jacket for the Black Eyed Peas’ frontman with a LED video system.

 

(c) Moritz Waldemeyer
(c) Moritz Waldemeyer

Waldemeyer has created his very own LED video platform, which can be applied on every wearable use case and play effects and video directly from a SD card.

 Take That

The british pop band Take That was also one of his clients. For a tour he equipped 5 jackets with 400 LEDs each in a very short amount of time

(c) Moritz Waldemeyer
(c) Moritz Waldemeyer

Here are some nice impressions from his work:

From his videos and photos I tried to find out, what he used to build my own system, but from what I come up with it’s nothing I can do from my knowledge right now.

Kiki Tay

When I searched for other variants I encountered Kiki Tay. The self-appointed LED magician from the other side of the world showed his Jacket at Maker Faire 2013 in Singapore. He used LED stripes with a total of 638 RGB LED pixels from type WS2812b.

(c) Kiki Tay
(c) Kiki Tay

In his blog he describes how he used 100h of research and development. The hardest were the power requirements but I think his result is astonishing!

 

LED Jacket – 01: The idea

Posted on by Hendrik
Throwies

Once every semester our student representatives organizes a special themed party which is electrical engineering like illuminated with tons of LED “Throwies”. These so called “Throwies” are made of of a coin cell battery, some tape, a magnet and a LED. Combined with a logo sticker are they placed on the walls of the club like this:

Throwies im Club
Throwies in the club.

After a while all of them are used as a stylish accessory and everyone is blinking and glowing. So I got the idea to go a little more extreme on this one. My plan is to stick as many LEDs as possibly on a jacket and control them individually to get a huge display.