Show HN: Making a flexible "neon" t-shirt with LED filaments
scottbezek.blogspot.com
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Author here, happy to answer any questions!
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Have you thought about ways to make the lights detachable so you can wash the garment? Or is the trade off at a point where redoing it is easier overall?
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It’s maybe plausible to gently wash it with the filaments still attached? I did actually use connectors so the shirt could be detached from the drive electronics, though I’d be a bit worried whether the stitches would survive and corrosion on the solder joints. Adhesive/waterproof heat shrink could maybe help?
The other option is maybe attach the filaments to an embroidery style patch instead of the shirt itself and then attach it with Velcro to the shirt?
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Just want to say- this is a really neat idea and project!
p.s. thanks for the additional sourcing details
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AliExpress and Adafruit, e.g. https://www.adafruit.com/product/5867
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I wonder if white thread would've been more invisible, the black thread seems more obvious against the LEDs? Being nitpicky, its a cool project for a single night.
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this is a really cool project! In the future you might want to print the paper designs in reverse and put it on the inside. Any paper remnants wouldn't be visible. I think that's how a lot of embroidered products do it, and I've had some hats that leave a lot of the material instead of tearing it out.
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Cool project. The best part is the actual pictures, you can tell taken with care by a human and the project is well described. So hard to find decent writing these days.
I think for your next big idea create a tee that can match any company's swag brand; I am just tired of managing tees that fill up my drawer, I wish I had one that could be me all. ;)
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One of my kids had something like this built into a Halloween costume that their mom procured from Amazon. One of the filaments was blinking out within a day so I started running the length of the filament to figure out where the bad connection was. Unexpectedly it shocked the hell out of me. I put a meter on it and it was 240V. I couldn't believe I got such a nasty poke from 2 AA batteries.
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was it perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroluminescent_wire instead
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The pwm animation/flicker/ramp up was a REALLY nice touch
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Ooo this is cool, I didn't know these exist. I once half made something like this with EL wire but I stopped after getting an electric shock from some EL tape. Turns out the edges are not at all insulated and you need high voltages to drive them. I'm not wearing that. 24V sounds much nicer.
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Is "LED Filament" the same as "EL Wire" ?
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Looks solid, best of luck with it.
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>"This is how I designed and assembled a wearable neon shirt in just a few days. [...] Of course, the whole thing is quite silly and that was kind of the point. It's not a practical garment, and wasn't meant to be, but I found it to be quite a fun artistic challenge with things I already had in the parts bin. And in case you're wondering, no, it's not machine-washable. Nor hand-washable, really."
I personally think it's a brilliant idea!
And, if you could solve the washability problem, then you could potentially make million$!
Anyway, a brilliant idea!
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That's a nice wearable!
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Beautiful! Thank you for sharing.
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We old timers used to use EL wire for this.
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Yes I've used that too but it has some drawbacks. It's way less flexible for starters, and not as bright. It's not dimmable unlike the leds.
Also it needs much higher voltage around 100V compared to leds so you always need some bucket converter. And there's a minor risk too when it comes to wearables though in general the wire is well insulated.
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Reminds me of a Japanese tech demo on YouTube I can't find right now, of projecting a flexible hologram on to a t-shirt with invisible markers.
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This is great, because the one problem I have with the cyberpunk dystopian future we live in, is the disappointing lack of neon.
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want!
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looking great!
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They look great but they're difficult to solder. Too little heat and it doesn't attach, too much and it damages them. The strip has some annoying coating that repels the solder.
Some of them have metal crimped contacts that solve this but at the expense of end flexibility. And those usually have contacts at each end, i prefer them with both contacts at the same end so I can cut the strips to size.
They're also prone to breaking and the silicone is very resistant to glues and it keeps jumping around when you try to fix it in place. Embedding totally in liquid latex helps but if you use a lot it takes ages to cure.
I tend to just drive them with an ESP powered by a simple power bank. Just like the OP but I tend to leave out the drivers, for short lengths 3V is ok directly on the ESP. The WLED firmware with an ESP-S3 and a MEMS microphone can even do audio reactivity.
I combine them usually with ws2812 strips too which have individual RGB. These flexi strips of course don't.
Ps one annoying thing is that some strips are much brighter on one side than the other, and some are not. But on AliExpress it's really hard to determine which ones you end up getting.
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