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ElectriCute: LED String Lights & You
This installment of our new e-textiles how-to video series shows you how to incorporate LED string lights into your Halloween costume!
Ever wondered how to incorporate embedded electronics into your textile projects, or why you should give products like the LilyPad line a shot? Our newest video series - ElectriCute (puns!) - covers the ins and outs of some of our favorite e-textiles products and how you can use them, with the help of TechStylist and e-textiles enthusiast Dia Campbell, and Creative Technologist Nick Poole. They've got ideas, people. Ideas like you wouldn't believe.
Halloween is just around the corner, and our collective enthusiasm for the holiday is well-documented. In our latest ElectriCute video, Nick and Dia show us some ways to incorporate our LED light strings into different Halloween costumes. We really, really want you to win your respective costume contests.
Now get to it. If you're interested in learning about more of our e-textiles products, Dia and Nick also used our fiber optic fabric to make a (very seasonally-appropriate) model of Zero, of Nightmare Before Christmas ghost dog fame. Check it out!
Interested in learning more about LEDs?
See our LED page for everything you need to know to start using these components in your project.
What would happen if you used a diffused or a non diffused laser instead of an LED? Would it be visible in daylight?
Lumen output of your light source is going to be the factor that matters, visibility in daylight would most likely require lumens in several orders of magnitude greater than the methods displayed in this video.
To answer the question more throughly the actual factor that counts is the Lux (lumens per sq. meter) of the light that the "receptor" receives from the light source. Due to the way lasers work they create higher lux ratings in the area they illuminate than an LED of the same lumen output, however the narrow beam emitted by a laser might cause issues with larger bundles of fibers not being fully lit. You are better off using a powerful narrow beam LED than a laser for bundled fiber optics such as these.
When working with the fiber optic fabric, would it help to grind off the top bit of LED so as to make a better (flat) connection with the fiber bundle?
Maybe? I think you'd have to also polish it, or you'd be making things worse by roughing up the LED, but beyond that, it seems really possible that there would be an improvement! If you experiment with this idea, we'd love to hear how it goes! And if WE experiment with it, we'll let you know too!