Give your festival coat a glow-up with programmable LEDs and WLED.

In this project, you'll add colorful, animated lights to the fur trim of a coat, then take it a step further with 2d-mapped LED cuffs for even more eye-catching effects.

This project can be as simple or as ambitious as you want to make it. If you're new to wearables or WLED, start with the fur trim for a very approachable, no-solder, no-code beginner build. You'll learn the basics of adding LEDs to clothing, wiring them to a controller, and choosing effects from WLED without needing to write any code.

Adding lights to the cuffs bumps the project into intermediate territory. You'll arrange the LEDs into small 2D matrices and configure WLED's 2D mapping features. This part requires some soldering and wire splicing, and a little more software setup. 

Do just the trim or build the whole thing—the result is a festival-ready coat that's bright, customizable, and easy to control from your phone.

Materials for Fur Trim Only - Easy No-Solder Project

The difficulty of this project can vary depending on the coat you're working with. It's easiest to use a coat that already has fur trim and lining. White fur will transmit the lights best, though other light colors will work too. Black is beautiful but also fairly opaque, so stick with light colors for this project.

Use the Adafruit Mini Sparkle Motion with the Pre-soldered Terminal Block for a no-solder project. 

For power, plug into a USB battery power bank. I like this one since it has a charge indicator, an onboard flashlight, and it is beefy enough to run my coat all night long and also charge up my phone at the same time.

You'll Also Need

• A seam ripper
• A needle and thread
• A plastic bodkin to help with threading the lights into the coat

Materials for Fur Trim + Cuffs - Intermediate Project

If you want to add 2d-mapped lights to the cuffs, and are comfortable with a soldering iron, here's what you'll need.

Get all the products listed above. However, if you're comfortable with soldering, choose the Mini Sparkle Motion (without terminal blocks) instead. This is the same board but made for a more permanent installation.

This board is a slightly better choice for festival wear. The wires can pull out of the terminal blocks, making your coat turn off mid-party, which is no fun at all. Soldered wires are more secure, and secure is always a better choice for wearables if you've got the skills.

We'll run wires from the controller to the cuffs. Get two sets of connectors, one for each cuff, and two lengths of ribbon cable.

The cuffs on my coat are pretty wide, giving me space to set up the lights in a 2d matrix. This means I can run horizontal or vertical animations on the cuffs, adding a lot of cool effects to the coat. Glue dots fix the lights to fusible fabric interfacing, creating a transparent matrix with the lights that can be stuffed inside the cuff.