A Micrcontrollerless Wearable Maze Runner that Uses Sensors to Light up a Snaking Animation from your Movements
Designed by Melton Sparks in CanadaSign up to get notified when this product is back in stock!
What is it? A highly-visible interactive art piece that responds to user motion, this hexagonal-shaped device reacts to you, lighting up LEDs that travel down a winding corridor to the center. Rock i…
Read More…A highly-visible interactive art piece that responds to user motion, this hexagonal-shaped device reacts to you, lighting up LEDs that travel down a winding corridor to the center. Rock it at events/parties/concerts, keep yourself or your pets safe in the dark, or add it as part of your outdoor gear to keep yourself highly visible.
Features include:
Melton Sparks is a collaborative business between an engineer and an artist. We create products that are interactive, functional, and beautiful. This wearable maze runner is assembled using lead-free solder and coated with a silicone conformal coating, so it is safe for you, but also safe from you.
We wanted to make an interactive design that responded to a wearer rather than having a wearable art piece that just blinked, looped an animation, or statically lit up. Our emphasis was to make something sophisticated and self-contained, but compact enough to wear, required no programming or setup, and stood out.
Our design is very hardware-oriented as opposed to most LED wearables that are driven by a microcontroller with neopixels. Using a dense pattern of 72 monochromatic 0603 LEDs, we animated an LED runner that traverses a maze using a number of shift registers cascaded together to address each LED sequentially. This required no programming and was driven purely by discrete components. The device uses an astable multivibrator as the clock for all shift registers that sets animation speed. The sensor input is a vibration sensor that is conditioned by an RC filter to debounce the input and set the width of the LED chain. A CMOS buffer amplifier then provides the RC filter with a high impedance load while amplifying the signal for the master shift register to sequence the LEDs in a brilliant digital cascade.
The board is equipped with extremely small TVS diodes (short bonding wires resulting in lower impedance, extremely fast clamping speeds up to 30kV contact discharges) along with 50uF of low ESR ceramic bypass capacitors spread around the hexagon to protect the board from repeated electrostatic discharges from being handled and worn by people or pets, and put in contact with fabrics and clothing that are often electrostatically charged.
Blue, Ice Blue, and Violet colors are made to order, so please expect some assembly lead time
Because blue and violet require a higher voltage Li-ion coincell battery, We've added the option to include a coincell charger in orders.
This charger is programmed to charge at a 0.3C charge rate to maximize its capacity and cycle life. Charge time is approximately 3 hours at 12mA for a 40 mAh coincell.
Insert the coincell into the holder and connect a typical Micro USB connector to the board for USB charging.
Disclaimer: This device was designed to recharge 20mm lithium-ion coincells (LIR2032, 2025, 2020, 2016). CR2032 coincells can fit in the battery holder, but are not designed to be recharged. Attempting to recharge CR2032 coincells will simply result in the battery becoming hot and failing over time. Melton Sparks takes no responsibility in the unintended use of its products.
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