Pleeeease help. Wind powered LED lights for college project dress.

[Patrizia Venier]

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[Magic Matt]

"The LED flowers glow up gently when the wind or your breath touches them."

I think you may want to study articles about that dress in detail, as I can't see any way it could be wind powered. Most of the links say it's wind sensitive, and that's very different. I suspect in the centre of those dandelions, you may find a 3V coin cell or similar providing the actual power.

Stijn Ossevoort also has a background in industrial engineering, so probably knows how to make a movement sensor or two.

A cluster of even the lowest powered LEDs commercially available would need more power than the wind could generate just walking down the average catwalk in a design studio. There are also no turbines etc. to convert the wind into electrical energy, so again I don't see how it could be wind powered.

 

[Patrizia Venier]

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[T0RN4D0]

Definitely not wind powered. You should be looking into the sensors, thats the name of the game in that dress. Power source is probably a few button cells hidden either in the yellow blob or somewhere else in the dress.

 

[Patrizia Venier]

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[Paul Baldwin]

Hi Patrizia,
were you intending on using the same sort of conductive thread to make the dress? http://www.fashioningtech.com/page/conductive-thread I'm sure there are plenty of people on here who can help you out if you decide on which type of and how many leds you need to light. If you are not wanting anything too fancy a string of leds should be very easy to get to work with a suitable battery.
Would you score extra marks for mentioning a possible supply alternative to batteries even if it's not in production yet? Potentially you could light some leds using body heat. http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/06/18/the-power-of-my-wrist/ Something like that for example. Sadly it's only a project and is not in production. That woud be a truly green solution too, the module that produces the electricity can last 200,000 hours and has no moving parts so should effectively last forever. The only problem being they produce very little power at the moment.
Or cheat, spend $12 on a T-shirt and extend it a bit lol http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.20715
You can buy led light strings ready made if you can conceal the wires http://www.instructables.com/id/Super_easyquickcheap_and_effective_Tony_Stark_Ir/
I just searched the instructables site for "led string", there are lots of examples, not just that one.

Paul.

 

[photonwave]

I would suggest using some tiny SMDs for your lights, as they're now in quite tiny packages and can produce quite a noticable light. They are a little difficult to work with if you don't have proper reflow soldering equipment (and I had to rig my own from a desoldering iron,) but otherwise these would likely be an ideal diode for your project. Otherwise, 3mm tail-thru packages should suffice for workability reasons.

Depending upon how you design the dress/number/type of diodes, you're looking at possibly button cells hidden amongst the folds of the dress, if not perhaps a small bank of C or D-cell batteries (for the high mAh, still easily hidden as you wouldn't need many.)

Incorporating a color-matched coated wire would be somewhat ideal, for camouflage, of course.

Sorry I can't help you more, I'm rather scatter-brained and work 10000000x better when I've actually got the materials in front of me.

 

[Ken_McE]

You should also look into electroluminescent (EL) lights.