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@chad_steinglass what kind of material is that bottom layer of the vest? ( diy or just bought as is?)
I think based on your design, you’ve got the best way, to lay them down, then solder the wires.
with my 34 strips on mine, i was able to plug power on either end and one power point in the middle of them.
but your mask technique would be slick.
@Randal_B ha - this is a vest from amazon - like formal wear style. all polyester, and the cheapest one I could find literally $6 and came with a tie and a handkerchief!
Yeah - we’ll see how it comes out and how durable it is. There’s a prohibition/roaring 20s theme party in NYC next weekend, which is why I went for the formal wear look - planning to wear it with the pixels exposed. But I figure I can use it as an LED baselayer with fur over it much like yours later on.
One of my big issues I think will be power management. Like with the coat, the power cycel when plugging in the LEDs makes them flash white for a milisecond (or less), but if they’re all on the same circuit that will be enough to trip fault protection on any battery I use. So I’ll have to break them up into independent circuits to power them on section by section. But thats fine because I’ll have to split the data line up and use parallel output anyway if I want to keep frame rate up
I see you’ve gone with an isometric layout on the vest, @chad_steinglass , curious to hear how that works out with the programming. You’ve got a lot of LEDs there :).
I had success with braided copper grounding strap for power distribution on my jacket. Heavy duty, low resistance and flexible. I can’t find a photo of the jacket, but this illustrates the principle: https://plus.google.com/112974620627169436992/posts/DG5Ye6B77KK
I never saw the issues you’re seeing about the LED flash tripping your over-current on connecting. I’ve got 640 LEDs split across 2 power buses with a Limefuel battery on each and it worked fine.
Ah, here it is: https://plus.google.com/112974620627169436992/posts/SQ5wJtbdfNo
@Robert_Atkins Quite a well engineered build!
And for whatever reason, I’m actually not having the startup flash-overload problem on my new vest, so it might just very well have been a some bad manufacturing on the strips I used for the coat.
And yeah - moving to the 60/m from 30/m strips certainly makes the number of pixels go up pretty quickly! The vest has about 1500 LEDs. The programming isn’t too bad - just takes a few minutes with excel to build a lookup table for my XY function.
I’ve really been into the power bus idea recently - I feel like it makes everything more reliable and easier to trouble shoot and fix if there ever is a problem. I also never run anywhere close to full power, so my most recent iteration is to use I think 22AWG silicone coated wire for the buses, and I just strip a tiny bit of insulation off and solder the single wire directly to a pad on each strip. Its really sped up my build time 
@chad_steinglass i did my power bus similar to that. except I used these splice connectors. I have power on one end, then splicing in every 1/4. (keeping the 3 wire connections on all of the strips) no power issues to date. Only issue i had is a single led going on a strip, and having to replace it or the strip itself.
@Randal_B Have a picture of the splice connectors? I’ve been looking for something like that.
And yes, some kind of power bus is essential if you want good brightness and no “yellowing out” along your design, with anything more than a couple of meters of strip.
@Robert_Atkins here’s a few pics.
led vest connectors https://imgur.com/a/EENgX
it’s lasted two burns and a few other festivals so far.
Ah right, yeah those would seem to work well with wire of sufficient gauge.