Trey German, LaunchPad Applications Manager at Texas Instruments, shares his experience of applying LaunchPad LEDs in a Halloween costume in this latest entry.

With less than 24 hours before Halloween, I knew I had to do something. Once again… it was the day before and I had no costume. Some friends had suggested that I dress up as a lumberjack, given my awesome beard and mustache as well as the fact that it would take nothing more than a flannel shirt and some jeans. It was a good idea, but I knew I wouldn't stand out from the crowds of other folks dressed up in traditional costumes.

I wanted to do something that would blow people away with how cool it was, but how could I build a costume like that from scratch in less than 24 hours?

Trey German dressed up in the LaunchPad controlled LED suit. (TI/LEDinside)

Surprisingly enough, the answer to that is "very easily" if you use the right tools. Earlier in the week, a co-worker showed me a video of a child dressed up as a stick figure using EL wire. I thought this was a great idea and decided to replicate this for my costume, but with a few improvements. Instead of EL wire, I would use LPD8806 based LED strips and a LaunchPad to control them.

I started out by purchasing a black hoodie and jeans. These would be my canvas on which I would build my LED stick figure. Adhesive velcro strips were applied where the LED strips would sit. After applying the LED strips, they needed to be soldered together in order to reconnect the places where they were cut. Finally a MSP430F5529 LaunchPad and USB battery were connected to power and control all of the strips.

The final piece of the costume was the software. Adafruit provides an excellent library for these strips, but it’s designed to work with Arduino. No worries though. Because Energia uses the same APIs as Arduino, the library was directly portable. I was able to simply download the Arduino library, place it in the appropriate folder in Energia, and run the examples it came with. I was able to get the LEDs to light on the first try!  Once I had the library working, I modified the example code to allow me to manually switch between the different color modes using one of the LaunchPad's built in push buttons. I also added some code that allowed me to turn off all the LEDs using the other spare pushbutton on the LaunchPad.

In the end, I had one of the best costumes, all powered by LaunchPad. As I walked down the streets of Houston, cars honked at me, people stared and I can't count the number of "awesome costumes" that I got.  All in all, it was a great last minute costume and I owe it to LaunchPad and Energia.