Been working on this for TTITD as a fun little project. Two gloves, each one has 3 rows of 9 pebbled LEDs. These are then connected to a pb pico, which is then connected to a DC DC up converter to take a single 350 mah battery from 3v to 5v.
The runtime is not great right now at 50% brightness - I get around 1.5 hours or so (I know I know… running WiFi is gonna kill it fast). I might see if I can comfortably fit a 1000 mah battery in the pouch. A runtime of 3-4 hours would be great.
Got it all wired up and synced, now I just need to finish the sewing for the second one, and then program some fun patterns for it!
Love how flexible and easy this was to get working. Never could have done this 5 years ago.
I don’t really know, but, I imagine the voltage booster takes some efficiency away - I find pico + 100 ws2812b actually seems in practice to work just fine from 3.7V. Maybe try it, see if it seems to run OK and see how long the runtime is that way?
(I got the tip that it runs OK from 3.7v from a forum post here, so I tried it, and yeah it works for me!)
The pico is happy at lipo voltages, and works OK for 80-90% of the usable capacity of the battery. That is probably as good or better runtime than you’d get if you boosted it and used 100% of the battery capacity since the extra power is usually just being wasted.
For the lipo voltages, I saw there are 3v pads on the back, should I use those for connecting to the battery and then have the LEDs on the 5v, or can it all go through the 5v?
I should add that it depends on the battery a bit too, some have higher internal resistance and small wires, which can cause voltage drop when the LEDs pull current.
No, use the 5V input. The 4.2V is too high to bypass the voltage regulator, which will keep it at or below 3.3v.
That could mean its going to have a higher internal resistance. I’d measure the voltage when nothing is connected, and again under heavy load to get an idea for the voltage drop from the battery’s resistance.
Yeah. These have the same specs as the 350 mah ones I have been using, although I guess that is with the dc dc converter. Will play with that tonight and see how it does. Luckily the pebble leds really don’t draw as much as the normal 5050 strips, and given that its only 27 total per glove, I feel pretty confident that it’ll never hit more than 500 ma.
I have massive battery life gains by running directly a Pixelblaze standard + sensor board + LED directly on my Li-Ion batteries (with a switch in the middle to turn it on and off).
Make sure for this than your battery has a BMS integrated though.
LED are less bright at 100% luminosity (obviously) but this has never been an issue for me for wearables. 100% is way too bright unless you’re doing a stage show. But pebble LED tend to be less bright in general than LED on strips, so you might need to check if it fits you.
I do have the sensors… and I am tempted to play with it, but not sure how much time I’ll have to play with patterns.
My camp is Burner Dojo, so lots of martial arts themed shenanigans. I would love to have some patterns that react to fast movements like jabs/punches, and others that are more flowy based on wing chung movements.
I use normal switches you can find in any electronic store. Honestly I don’t recommend you mine: it’s a push button but if you press it just a little bit but not all the way, it cuts powers then restarts it right away as it comes back to position, which tends to reboot Pixelblaze if you play talk much with it.
I’d prefer a switch that cuts powers only once it has passed to the off state.
My kid has been watching Jujutsu Kaizen (and playing Roblox Jujutsu Shenanigans, speaking of Shenanigans!) — anime with martial arts and magic sometimes summoned by finger positions. Now making these funny mudras while trying to convince me of something …
I’m imagining a pico between 2 gloves, with finger position sensors (wires from the fingertips pushing/pulling potentiometers? I guess this exists for VR already…) and contact sensors (complete the circuit by joining your hands). If you make the correct finger gesture and rotate your hands with the right force (as revealed by the LEDs in realtime), you can add power to your punch!
(Added to the stack of cool things that are possible with PB!)
(Also to the stack of reasons I want two-way communication between patterns! @wizard !)
This would be… so fun, but I have never messed with that kind of level of sensors and inputs. These gloves also don’t have finger covers, but easy enough to find some that might work for that.
