Sure! Alkaline packs are recommended for beginners, but advanced users with experience using/caring for rechargeable lipoly batteries might upgrade to a 500mAh cell per shoe. Read more in the guide on battery powering your wearable electronics.
The LED strip is in a weather resistant sheathing and should suffice for short grass and wet pavement, but if you want to go out in the rain, you should switch out the conductive thread for stranded wire and take steps to waterproof your circuit board. Here's a video on "rugged-izing" your wearables:
So this project was published before GEMMA existed. Yes, you can use GEMMA (in the sketch, change the sensor pin to A2 and the pixel output to 1), it's just harder to calibrate your sensor since there's no simple serial debugging on GEMMA. You can hack a serial connection with our guide, or find your sensor levels through time-consuming trial and error.
Adafruit support engineer Bill writes:
The firewalker code is a little tricky. It calculates all the color values before calling setPixelColor.
What I did was simply exchange the "r" and "b" values so the color spectrum starts at blue instead of red.
Just replace the similar looking 'for' loop in your code with:
for(i=0; i<SHOE_LEN_LEDS; i++) { // For each LED on one side...
level = mag[i]; // Pixel magnitude (brightness)
if(level < 255) { // 0-254 = black to blue-1
b = pgm_read_byte(&gamma[level]);
g = r = 0;
} else if(level < 510) { // 255-509 = blue to cyan-1
b = 255;
g = pgm_read_byte(&gamma[level - 255]);
r = 0;
} else if(level < 765) { // 510-764 = cyan to white-1
b = g = 255;
r = pgm_read_byte(&gamma[level - 510]);
} else { // 765+ = white
r = g = b = 255;
}
// Set R/G/B color along outside of shoe
strip.setPixelColor(i+SHOE_LED_BACK, r, g, b);
// Pixels along inside are funny...
j = dup[i];
if(j < 255) strip.setPixelColor(j, r, g, b);
}
Yep, the code has a variable for the index of the pixels at the front and rear of the shoe, which will adjust the animation accordingly.
You probably don't have the right board selected in the Arduino IDE. A9 doesn't exist on an Arduino Uno, so make sure you have Adafruit Flora selected as your board under Hardware-> Board.
If you want to commission a maker to build these for your, post up in the Adafruit Jobs board! We've seen similar looking LED sneakers (without the rad pressure-sensitive fire animation) on Ebay and Etsy, so you may have some luck finding some online.
