I'm super proud and excited about this project!
My dear friend Allan approached me a couple months ago with the idea of attaching LEDs to this incredible vintage costume jacket. He envisioned strips of LEDs on the large lapels & drew me a napkin sketch over dinner.
Once I got the jacket, I mapped out where some pixels might go and how many I'd be able to get on the lapels, settling on using strips of 144/meter NeoPixels to get 120 pixels on the jacket.
I soldered together small sections of NeoPixels and arranged them into a matrix formation on either lapel, and drove the pixels with an Adafruit Gemma M0. The Gemma M0 is amazing and driving 120 pixels over two pins plus a button is so easy. This sketch only uses about 10% of the space on the Gemma M0, so there’s loads more space to add additional animations or power additional pixels. I could've used MakeCode or CircuitPython with the Gemma M0, but I really wanted to use FastLED.
I utilized Mark Kriegsman's special XY mapping code with FastLED to tell the Gemma the location of each pixel and run some incredible animations.
For more information, see the Adafruit Disco Band Camp Jacket guide or the video below: