This LED Rave Mask Has Burning Man Written All Over It
Armaiz Ardenwala’s Arduino-powered, light-up mask is made up of 161 NeoPixels.
NeoPixels, or more formally WS2812B and similar LEDs, can help you create a wide variety of awesome patterns. They even enabled Armaiz Ardenwala’s “LED Rave Mask,” which could be from either an amazing dream, or a horrible nightmare depending on the context.
The mask is designed around a former Airsoft mesh mask, which forms a base for 161 LEDs arranged in seven rows of decreasing length over one’s mouth area. It uses 144 LEDs/meter strips, which “is a lot of pixels” according to Ardenwala. So 60 LEDs per meter would also probably work if you don’t need to literally light up the room.
An Arduino Nano controls the device, with power provided by a trio of AAA batteries. Adenwala notes that you could use four rechargeable NiMH batteries at 1.2V each, but you’d need to be sure to keep under 5V total.
A large part of Adenwala's write-up focuses on actually programming the mask in different patterns, using the FastLED library. Each row of LEDs decrements by one unit in each step and is configured with the help of a 1D array. LEDs appear to have a sort of hexagonal shape because of this shortening and new visual patterns can reportedly be set up in just a few minutes. Naturally, Adenwala has lots of future plans for the project, so it will be interesting to see how it progresses!
