I came up with the idea of using EL wire strips to go down the sleeves. Whit EL wire spirals. With RGB NeoPixels being used for other color effects on the shirt and pants.

Too bad the 3 volt, 2xAA battery, power for them don’t have intermittent power usage. I could probably make a program so an arduino could run the power for an EL strip, panel, or wire in a semi-random pattern. I don’t know enough to feel comfortable in doing this.

edit: Oct 27, didn’t get it done.

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I was looking around for small plastic bottles…

and I realized I had about 20 of the Mini-M&M bottles. So those might work for costumes. I haven’t checked to see if the printing can come off of them or not. They are in a box somewhere, and I haven’t located them yet.

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Still putting it together.

Some of the mechanical connections are out of sequence in that if they had been just a bit differently, I wouldn’t have had to use tweezers to get the nut on the bolt in multiple locations.

I find a headband light to be useful as well.

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A mech arm. Frame with different colors of translucent plastic, led lights and the 1.8 inch tft from adafruit inside.

I have the Arduino UNO r3, several led lights, and the 1.8” tft 18-bit screen. A strip of 3 color LED lights.

I’m not sure if I’ll be adding EL wire or not.

As I work on it, I’ll upload photos of the arduino/tft part.

Probably add a vent fan, to keep my arm cool.

Update: 21 Dec 2013

Looks like the Radio Shack RBG LED strip is going to be a pain. See this post on my site.

Update: Feb 22, 2014

Buying the Tri-color LED strip from Radio Shack was a big mistake. This puts a serious crimp in my plans to have this ready for the one convention I attend each year.

Update: March 1, 2014.

Due to various things, I’ll be making lights from diffuse common cathode LEDs.

I have one to work, and an idea on using a small printed circuit board from Radio Shack to get several of these LEDs to work at the same time with one arduino uno r3.

I have a small 12vdc fan to keep my arm cool.

June 30, 2014

Not currently working on this. Probably start back up in August of this year.

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Unlike the LED strips from item 306 from adafruit.com, only the tri-color ones from Radio Shack are programmable.

The single color LED strips from Radio Shack are just bright strip lights.

The Radio Shack ones requires 12 volts at 1 amp to work, but Radio Shack stores don’t have battery power items that put out the voltage and current needed.

Adafruit’s LED strip uses 5 volts at 120 miliAmps, and they do have the battery power items that can power these strips.

Radio Shack tri-color LED strip is setup to use 3 LEDS as one.

Adafruit tri-color LED strip are setup to use each LED individually.

So my heart felt advice is to avoid the LED strips at Radio Shack. Don’t waste your money getting the ones from Radio Shack.

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