A Party Shirt Using 1700 NeoPixels!

A wonderful surprise on the Adafruit Show and Tell last Wednesday July 4th: Marc showed us his amazing NeoPixel light-up party shirt.

Over 1700 NeoPixels of eye burning luminosity including high refresh rate matrix panels on the front and back.

On his blog, Marc writes:

After I figured that my previous shirt was getting a bit stale, I wanted to design EDM Party Shirt v2, which both had to be easier to wash (the previous one had LED strips all over it that were too much work to remove, making the shirt not really washable), and I also wanted it to be more special.
I had been playing with Adafruit::NeoMatrix and figured it would be cool to have a NeoMatrix on my shirt (also it would be easier to remove a whole panel to wash the shirt).

His work ultimately led to the FastLED library and a non-trivial rewrite to make FastLED::NeoMatrix. A lot of work!

There’s a mind-numbing number of animations for the shirt. And he has 160Wh (10Ah/4S) worth of LiPo batteries to power it all. This project is definitely a favorite.

You can see all the build details and the fun Marc’s having with his shirt on his blog!

This includes all the code at https://github.com/marcmerlin/NeoMatrix-FastLED-IR

Building your own NeoPixel project? Let us know in the comments!