Light Up Kitty🐱 Ears

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Inspired by Anouk Wipprecht's "Light Up Kitty Ears!" tutorial, I've been eager to embark on a beginner blinky project.

A few years ago, I met a fellow startup founder who created 555comic, where anime characters like Luna Gardner would tweet with fans, and enabled a cross-meta-verse AI-Human social network that was super fascinating. He gave me this Luna hoodie which was supposed to be a piece of fandom merchandise, and now this serves as the perfect base for my beginner small and kawaii wearable project.

nLITEn is a modular smart garment design system developed at Fuse33 Makerspace by the founders of Makefashion. All the components are engineered to be plug-and-play with no solder and no coding.

After Hackster's Techfashion Design Challenge 2023, I'm excited to finally sit on the creator side of the table this time to work with the tech.

nLITEn's modular system makes creating blinky wearable garments super simple for anyone with or without tech background. The 101 beginner basic modules are:

• LEDs
• Power Source
• Controller

The circuit is as straightforward as it can be - connect the LED strips to the power shield and the controller.

We used a 16340 battery shield (length 60mm * width 28mm * height 16mm), which is one of the smallest form factor of mobile battery pack that is available. The output is a standard USB. Then that connects to the nLITEn power injector, which allows easy and safe power management. The power injector can be placed anywhere in the circuitry to provide power or inject more into dimming LEDs.

I chose to use the 10 LED dual-edge emitting strips to wrap around the kitty ear edges as length-wise wise they are perfect to fit around the outer fabric.

The strip is in a very flexible yet rigid silicon wrapping that is easy to work with.

There's no super fancy treatment to the fabric "integration" aspect, as I'm still quite lacking in this area of skills. I simply poked holes in the hoodie and pulled wires and connectors through and into the inner layer.

And then just threaded the strip in place.

I really need to get better at sewing, this was an almost embarrassing job if seen by my grandmother, but it's functional.

The nLITEn Bluetooth controller runs BekonixOS, which makes wireless programming super easy. The software can be download here. There is an abundant effects library, and the drag-and-drop interface is very user-friendly.

Overall, I think I spent about less than 2hrs overall to make this first version.

Next, I want to add a button to control the lights easier as right now I'd have to take off the hoodie to turn the switch off from the battery shield.

Till then, make some grumpy kitty face ✨😽 to lighten up your day 🐈

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