Vernal: An arduino-powered fairy tale dress

My mother is a dressmaker, and some months ago, she received a request to make a Cinderella dress for a little girl's school prom.

However, due to the popularity of the live-action movie, every girl in the school had decided to use a Cinderella dress at the event. So, my mother decided to make something that could be unique and stand out. She called me, and after an afternoon watching the live action movie, we got an idea: Using leds, an arduino and an accelerometer, we could make a dress that would look like something out of a fairy tale!

The dress uses around a hundred 3mm ultra-bright leds, that I assembled by hand in long "chains", which were sealed using plastic and polymorph in order to make them water-resistant.

My mother made the dress, and we worked together to put the electronics on it.

In the end, the mission was accomplished, and the dress worked perfectly for around 5 hours before the battery ran out! However, that happened just in time, as the prom ended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX9k2yciIns

Dress

This is a superb mix of art, craftsmanship & electronics. I have a 4 day old granddaughter and this article is being archived for her.

Thanks!

Thank you very much for your kind words!

If you need some help at making your own version of this dress, I’ll be happy to help. Right now I’m working on ways to simplify the design.

Dress making skills

I have zero sewing skills and the idea of cutting expensive cloth is frightning. Adding a heart rate monitor and syncing the leds to it would be my type of work…

Amazing… the dress looks cool