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Awesome DIY Magic Butterfly Costume

This costume is made of Hoola-hoops, Bed Sheets, 20 meters of LED ws2811 (computer controlled) strip (tape) lights.  It has a total of 800 LED’s on it and takes a specially modified 20,000Mah power-pack (like you buy to recharge a cell-phone) to run for about an hour. (So I carried 5 other batteries as swap-out’s for when it goes dark.

I bent the hoola-hoops to the shape of the wings, then hotglued them to a bed sheet while pulling it tight.  Next I hot-melt glued the leds in place facing inward on each lit area.

I used an Adafruit Feather microcontroller to make the lights create patterns.  This was the hard part and represented hundreds of hours of learning and programming in C++.

Here I am at the 2016 NYC Parade:



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