Fashion police

[topum]

Apparently co-ordinating accessories is a minefield. There is a thin line between a hot new trend and a fashion faux pas. Bags, shoes and belts have been discussed excessively.
But should your hat match your walking stick?

In Istanbul

Comments

[topum.livejournal.com]

Smart! Hat or stick?

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Oh, both. maybe spats too.

I went so far as to design a set of earrings that would communicate with other similar earrings via optical networking, once upon a time, thinking it was a fantastic business plan: if you can get a bunch of kids to wear them, and they all start flashing in synch in a club, how totally cool! All the kids would buy them! Alas, that was somewhat before I could make them small enough to actually be wearable. Now, perhaps.

[topum.livejournal.com]

Wow. I think it is a fantastic plan and it is totally cool! Oh man, this is awesome.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

argh now I have to get back to that project. Let me think about it some more.

(Weird and seldom-discussed characteristic of LED's: they work in both directions. If you put power on them they shine light, but if you shine bright light on them they put out a bit of electricity. So, you can use them for bidirectional communications, and if you're flashing them fast enough nobody can tell visually that they're sending signals and others are, in their off time receiving those signals.

Unfortunately it gets very complicated very quickly when you have a dozen of them all trying to talk at the same time, when some can't see the others.

[topum.livejournal.com]

Wow, I had now idea. It is amazing.
OK. I now need to buy me some LED's. A lot of them actually.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

If you can buy in bulk from china you get way better prices. I had a friend who made a bodysuit covered in ultraviolet LED's once upon a time, 18 years ago when they were scarce as hens' teeth, so he bought 1K of them for the price 20 would have cost in the US. Be prepared for 10% of them to not work.

Hm. Now I have to think about a good way to generate 12,000 pwm signals for that cube. I wonder how they did it.

[topum.livejournal.com]

I think I will order them from China indeed. And will add some more cool stuff to the shipment.

A friend of mine is bringing a couple of huge super strong magnets for me from somewhere soon. The kind that cannot be flown on airplanes and can fly to each other across the room and kill people I think. That will be fun.
I also need to get some gallium to play with. And now I have to add LED's to the list too.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I have some smallish supermagnets. Those things are kind of terrifying. I've read about the large ones. YIKES.
There are some alloys like wood's metal that have gallium-like characteristics, as well, that may be cheaper.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Oh wrong thread. If you're not trying to build the cube:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-100pcs-SMD-SMT-0603-White-Red-Green-Blue-Yellow-LED-MIX-Super-bright-/361403601149?hash=item54255550fd:g:8hEAAOSw7NNUFBpm
would be a pretty good starting point for jewelry. Those things are like 1.5mm by 1mm each, so you can get several in a very tiny space.

[topum.livejournal.com]

I once wanted to build this really badly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K8i0JQzx2w
But then the next day I got obsessed with ferrofluid and played with it 16 hours straight. And the next day I decided to go to Akureyri, somehow it just felt like the right thing to do. So the led cube did not happen. Not that I could build it.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I liked Akureyri. It beat Havn all to pieces.
Totally want to get my hands on some ferrofluid some day.
That LED cube, I could totally build. I have the LED's, even. But programming it, whew. That's seriously a ton of work.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I guess it's mostly matrix manipulation. You'd do all the assignments in software and then just do it all as x,y,z coordinates. But actually making the graphics... it's just a zowie amount of work.

I had another neat idea about an addressable led string. They have these: long string of them, on a single wire, and you can turn off individual ones through a serial bus running down the power line. So, get a nice long string, loop it over your christmas tree just like any other string of lights, set up a webcam, and start blinking individual ones so you know where they all are in three-dimensional space, by moving the webcam around. Then you can blink them all on and off in a nice pretty random-seeming pattern, and at exactly one point in space they will spell out a rude word to an observer.

[topum.livejournal.com]

This is awesome! Now I want to research all kind of weird stuff one can do with LEDs and wait for my LEDs to come. By the time they will, I will definitely be on something else (or in Akureyri) but anyway.