Aside from looking cool in their own right, goggles can help hide the hairline in front.
You’ll need a bunch of these…not just for the “active” dreads (those with LEDs installed), but extras for “passive” dreads as well.
The full wig gets quite “hairy” as it goes together, so we’ll demonstrate with just a few ribbons to help keep things clear.
Once you’ve settled on an arrangement, the loops can be secured with basting glue or a couple of hand stitches.
Mount “Active” Dreads
Install Trinket and Route Wires
In order to distribute power and data to all of these strips, a small Perma Proto board was used. If you’d like to give everything a dry run first, you can hook things up temporarily on a breadboard, then transfer everything over to the Perma Proto once you’re satisfied.
Our wig used 10 LED strips. These were installed such that then “fan out” from a ring near the top of the head, looking like some sort of luminous deep-sea squid landed there. Viewed from the top (with the Trinket board at the back), it looks a bit like this:
+ and – from the battery needs to reach all the strips and the Trinket board (the Bat+ and Gnd pins). Depending on the number of LED strips and the proto board configuration, you may need to bridge a few tracks together. Clip each wire to a more manageable length as you’re routing them, then strip and solder them to the board (clipping any excess wire from underneath). It gets quite chaotic, hence the recommendation for color-coding the wires. Like all the prior steps, work methodically…for example, route all the ground wires, then all the +V wires, then signals.
The Trinket board only has five output pins, but our wig has ten LED strips. What we’ve done is connect two strips to each pin: the rear-most strip on the left and front-most strip on the right are both connected to Pin #0. Second rear-most left strip and second front-most right strip are connected to Pin #1, and so forth. You should be able to connect up to 3 or 4 strips per pin if necessary, but any more than that may become unreliable as the Trinket can only push so much current per pin.
Some users have reported trouble with uploading code to the board when NeoPixels are attached to Pins #3 and/or #4. This is one good reason for testing with a breadboard first. If you can upload code with no problem, then that’s great, you can install it permanently this way. If you encounter trouble, there are a couple of options:
- Add female socket headers to the proto board, so the Trinket can be removed for programming and then reinstalled. Or…
- Add a 2-pin JST connector to Pins #3 and #4, with the opposite plug connected to the corresponding LED strips. Unplug this connector before uploading code, then reconnect afterward.
Test all the electronics using the code on the next page (or write your own) before wrapping up this stage. Once you’re satisfied, the proto board can be stitched down more securely. If you’ll be wearing this somewhere warm or might just be dancing and perspiring a lot, first cover the underside of the board with a couple layers of packing tape or glue down some craft foam to help prevent electrical shorts. Perspiration — being mostly salt water — is both conductive and corrosive!
If you’re running short of crinoline tubes, or if you just want to add some variety, you can mix it up with long strips of craft foam, colorful bits of ribbon, or lengths of flat ribbon cable for a technological theme.