Markus Loeffler's Bright Wearable Is a Microchip ATtiny85-Powered Disco for Your Wrist

Sound-reactive 3D-printed wristband lights up 11 individually-addressable RGB LED segments in response to audio.

Maker and former Hollywood "color scientist" Markus Loeffler is working on a wearable that puts 11 individually-addressable LEDs on your wrist — and then synchronizes them to music.

"This project is a wearable animated wristband featuring 11× WS2812 LEDs stacked on top of a silicone band," Loeffler explains of the gadget. "The design uses 3D-printed elements — 11 glowing sections that tightly fit around each LED to hold it in place, alternated with 12 black spacer elements for clean separation and visual contrast."

A disco for your wrist: this 3D-printed ATtiny85-powered wearable responds to music in real-time. (📷: Markus Loeffler)

Inside a control box attached to the wristband, and designed to go underneath the wrist, the wristband is powered by a 220mAh lithium battery and driven by a Microchip ATtiny85 — a relatively lightweight microcontroller, to be sure, but one that delivers enough computational grunt to sample audio from a microphone and use the result to animate the individually-addressable LED segments.

Loeffler isn't the first to look at the wrist as a suitable place to pop some technology: even ignoring the popularity of smartwatches we've seen plenty of projects mounted there, from a DIY prosthetic finger and an ATtiny85-powered shake-to-blink gadget to the SoundWare, which augments play with gesture-based audio powered by an Arduino compatible microcontroller.

While Loeffler has a working prototype, though, there are still some kinks to be ironed out in the design. "[I'm] currently still working out the details of how to not break the strip of LEDs and reduce stress on the connection between PCB and strip," the maker admits.

More information is available on the projects' Hackaday.io page.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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