First, we got a bit of a primer on soldering, something that we (as Computer Scientists) had never done before. A special thanks to Dr. Oliver for showing us the ropes and letting us pretty much destroy a practice board with solder and hot tools.
Dr. Oliver also gave us something to think about: while EL wire is the standard currently for light-up dance suits, LED strips would both use slightly less energy and also allow us to choose which LEDS light up, rather than the whole strip. It's something to keep in mind moving forward - perhaps on the next iteration of the suit.
Now that we knew how to solder, we connected several of the hardware components necessary for working with the EL Sequencer. We followed the aforementioned Sound Reactive EL Wire Tutorial, soldering header pins into 5V FTDI pinholes, and onto the VCC, Ground, and A2 input pins.
Now that we had these put together, we were ready to move on. Much to our chagrin, we'd forgotten to get a USB-A to mini-B cable with which to connect the sequencer to a computer, so any programming had to be put off till one could be ordered and shipped in.
Instead, we started a prototype shirt with EL wire, baste stitching the wire to the shirt and beginning the basic design of what we want our suit to look like. More on that next week.
A basic but simple question we had: how do we cut EL wire? Well, we found the answer here, in the glowculture FAQ. (Spoiler alert: the answer is to just do it, and cap the ends with something non-conductive.)
Getting the physical hardware together has been exciting. Look forward to next week, when we should have some more videos and some cool lights up and running!
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