Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational battle station.
Oooh, very pretty!
More details please!
until it decides to go off and have a smoke 
(I jest, looks killer!)
LOVE LOVE LOVE this!!! You did such an amazing job! How do you switch modes (is it a wired switch or IR or what?)
What do you want to know? 640 WS2812B LEDs, powered by two Limefuel L130X batteries, split across two power buses (grounds connected.) Using FastLED’s dynamic power management to cap the draw at 20W, comfortably less than it’s ok to draw from a single USB port on each battery pack (connecting even the same pack’s ports together in parallel will cost you forty bucks of dead battery in short order.)
Each vertical strip of 12-20 LEDs is connected to the power bus (tinned copper grounding strap) via crimped blade connectors at the bottom, and to the next strip via JST connectors at the top. All the LEDs are in one string.
Running off a Teensy 3.0 with a lot of the code adapted from FastLED examples, plus some stuff I wrote myself from scratch. Some of the patterns are sound-activated (see if you can guess which—it’s subtle ;-). No level shifter, but it’s only about 25cm between the Teensy and the first strip, so I get away with it.
The control box has a master brightness pot (analogRead feeding right into FastLED.setBrightness()), program up/down buttons, plus a program-specific pot and button. The pot is mostly used as a sound-activation threshold. I’m using the Sparkfun BOB-09964 mic/amp breakout. The program-specific button is for changing palettes on the Noise program.
There’s more details in various of my posts here, and the code is at https://bitbucket.org/ratkins/technocolourdreamcoat2014/
The control box is wired. I’ll fix that when @Daniel_Garcia finishes RFDuino support 
This is so awesome. No problems with the teensy? I was worried about using one because of the 3v.
I had more problems trying to use a level converter (the wrong one—see post from earlier this week.) I think you’re more likely to get away with it if it’s only a short distance (< 30cm) from the Teensy to the first LED. (You’re fine running the Teensy itself off 5V, it has its own built-in regulator.)
As the locals would say here in Boston, that’s WICKED COOL!
Looking great!
Any estimation on weight? How long do the batteries last?
Can we see some pictures of how the LEDs are connected to the vest?
Thanks!
Completely awesome work! How did you map the LEDs? 2 dimensionally as if the vest portion was layer out flat?
Also if you don’t mind sharing, how did you handle the actual mapping in code roughly? Coordinate values for each led?
WOW !!! That is one awesome creation !!!
…eye browse raised…big smile…WOW. I need to make one ASAP. Well done sir. Not sure how to express my excitement
Very nice! You have to implement some of @Stefan_Petrick MSQEQ7 code: https://plus.google.com/115124694226931502095/posts/Y1YCzHWgJv5
Wicked sick!
Wow, awesome 
I especially like the “rotating starfield” animation (first and at 1:46 in the video) I will definitely look through your code and copy a few things
Do you have a video of the coat with lights on? I would like to see the connections and the controller and how you fixed the strips to the jacket bewow …
I got a couple of MSQEQ7s @Jon_Burroughs but ran out of time to play with them, I’ll save them for a future project. Might actually try HFT in software first, as I really only want to isolate bass beats. Space in the controller box is at a bit of a premium :-).
@Eran_Rundstein I think about 6kg all up, including batteries? I got 3 hours out of the plain white noise program the other night (20W) with the batteries showing a quarter remaining, so in real-world use, I reckon on it lasting all night easily. I posted a good photo of how the strips are all wired up a week or two ago, search my posts here.
@Lucas_Morgan , take a look at Effect.cpp in the repo I linked above to see how I did the mapping. Basically I treat it as a 36 x 24 array, except for some “holes” (underneath the arms, etc) for which I return a dummy pixel; there’s a fixed array of the heights for each column declared in Effect.cpp. Life.cpp treats the whole thing as a “toroidal array” (if you go off the top you come up at the bottom, etc) and Snake.cpp treats it as a cylinder.
@Gottfried_Mayer There are velcro strips sewn laterally into the jacket “substrate”, with the hook-side of the velcro stuck onto the strips (as above, see previous post for close-up photo.) But the strips’ adhesive isn’t worth a damn so it’s supplemented with bits of heat shrink here and there. It doesn’t really work well though, the velcro is coming off the back of the strips all over the place. I’d like to use zip ties, but the sharp cut-off ends of the zip ties would catch on the fluffy diffuser layer. If anyone’s got any better ideas for this part, I’m all ears (I’m disinclined to use electrical tape as it usually ends up making a great big sticky mess.)
Just so you know, Dan and I watched this video together a couple of times last night. It’s great.
Literally couldn’t have done it without your help 