Here’s what the finished setup looked like for some LED fun I put together for a 3.5 hour night “glow” hike. It turned out great. The 28 hikers all had multiple glow sticks in all varieties, but this was a total hit.
LPD8806 strip (1m long, 32 pixels), controller was a Teensy 3.0, and power from a cell phone recharger battery. The strip was slipped into one of those 1" cable organizer tubes and that attached to the backpack with a few Velcro straps. Controller and battery tucked perfectly into a little pocket on top of backpack. I had the master brightness turned down to 40 but it was still really bright out on the dark trails!
Code was a modified DemoReel100 sketch and a few more added patterns that it randomly picked between. I made a few patterns “rare” so they didn’t come up all the time, and one of the calmer patterns sort of the default that ran about 60% of the time.
I guess the advantage of using pool tubing would be that it’s more sealed/protective against the elements since it’s not slit open. @Andrew_Tuline , were you able to buy the pool tubing by the foot or in smallish lengths?
Here’s a video giving an idea of what it looked like in action. Video is running 4x speed so it was actually more calm then this for the people hiking along side. (But 4x speed does look cool too!)