Today we finished a testing version of our RGB light costume, this is a white shirt with nine LEDs that can be controlled over the wireless network to change colour during the performance.

The current design has four LEDs on each arm of the shirt and a central LED on the micro-controller board. Each LED module is attached to the shirt with velcro so that we can remove the electronics easily.

For this design, we used:

• Wemos D1 Mini Lite wifi microcontroller
• Wemos RGB shield
• 8x sewable neopixel boards (AliExpress from this open source design)
• Wemos protoboard shield and extra pin headers for connections

The firmware for the micro controller is here.

Here’s the controller board and one LED module:

Each of the LED modules contains a WS2812 ‘intelligent’ LED that can be controlled by a data signal from a micro-controller. At this point we are controlling all nine LEDs in the costume simultaneously, but they could also be addressed individually to program animations or movement effects.

These lights are surprisingly powerful! We tried out mapping the same pitch-mapped colours as our stage lights to the costume lights which are very convincing from the audience’s perspective!