Everybody's Sewing for the Weekend. Ok, maybe just me.

I'm making a sewn LED matrix. I spent most of my weekend working on this, and, it's pretty sweet.



Here I am prepping each of the 64 LEDs in hot glue (I only burned myself once!)



The long vertical and the horizontal traces were sewn on my newly inherited retro sewing machine, and each LED was stitched in by hand. I curled the positive end into a loop, stitched it down onto the horizontal trace, then poked the negative lead through and down to a separate piece of fabric, then curled and sewed that lead onto the negative trace.



The Lilypad Arduino is going to be used to drive my LED display, since it was made to be sewn and is pretty friendly to a total arduino newbie like myself.



Only one LED decided to snap off during the sewing project. In a moment of shear craziness, I started heating up my soldering iron. Thankfully I came to my senses and thought "This is why I prepped extra LEDs"



Here's a test! It isn't actually programmed or sewn to the Lilypad yet. This is just a test done by running a blink script on the arduino while having certain traces connected.




Anyways, that's where I'm at!