This is a RGB LED light-up dress I made for my niece for Halloween 2016 as she wanted to be a princess and I wanted to make her something magical. Nearly everyone who saw it while trick-or-treating had a reaction to it.
I used 5050 RGB LED strips, a simple 12VDC regulator, and Ryobi 18V cordless tools lithium ion battery to make the LED dress.
The 5050 RGB LED strips are mounted to a peiticoat / underskirt to allow the dress to be washed, modular, and to "poof" out the dress for extra effect. The LEDs are mounted facing inward to make a diffused glow and so the dress will not have point light sources.
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Power supply
For the power regular I used a super overkill cheap 240W step down buck power supply I found on amazon. I wanted something fully enclosed, waterproof, low heat, for piece of mind against arcing or overheating. There is probably a much better potted or fully enclosed low cost solution out there and would like to see what others recommend. There are a ton of low cost buck regulators on ebay but I have not seen good options for ones that are potted.
I'm seeing multiple LED strip Halloween outfits and am hoping that people doing this are using inline fuses or some other overcurrent protection methods to prevent arcs/sparks and possible resulting garment fires from the low internal resistance batteries being used. Perhaps the Ryobi Powertool Battery has internal protection for that? I see others just using multi-cell lipos.
awesome, my little girl would love this too