Show HN: Making a flexible "neon" t-shirt with LED filaments

scottbez1

Author here, happy to answer any questions!

4d4m

The pwm animation/flicker/ramp up was a REALLY nice touch

Razengan

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.

danilafe

Beautiful! Thank you for sharing.

buredoranna

This is great, because the one problem I have with the cyberpunk dystopian future we live in, is the disappointing lack of neon.

IshKebab

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.

mlmonkey

Is "LED Filament" the same as "EL Wire" ?

khaki54

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.

fnord77

We old timers used to use EL wire for this.

landgenoot

That's a nice wearable!

wolvoleo

Yeah I do kinda the same but I embed them into latex prosthetics. Like horns or protrusions for the face that you glue on. They're really good for a cyberpunkey vibe. I'm just casting some at the moment actually because we're coming up on Halloween soon. 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.

stuga

looking great!