Solder three six-inch wires to Vout, D1~, and GND pads on GEMMA, and plug in the battery pack. Glue GEMMA to the battery pack, then glue the battery pack to a hair clip.
Arrange five NeoPixels on a heat-resistant work surface and secure with tape. Make sure the scale of your layout matches your face.
Solder thin wires in a chain, connecting the data output of one pixel to the data input of the next, according to the circuit diagram. Also solder the wire coming from GEMMA's D1~ to the first pixel's input.

Solder both power and ground busses with thin wires connecting GND to all pixels' - and Vout to all pixels' +. It's easiest to strip two wires and solder them to each hole, since the solder fills up the hole which makes it tricky to solder another wire to.

Now that you have made all the necessary connections this would be a good time to jump to our CircuitPython Code or Arduino Code section of the tutorial. You will want to confirm that everything is functional before applying the LED backing with liquid latex mentioned below.
You're doing this project at your own risk. Make sure your circuit is perfect before considering sticking it to your face, since a short circuit could burn you.
Seal the back of each pixel with E6000 glue. Your skin is slightly conductive, especially if you sweat in your makeup, so you want to insulate each pixel's + and - from each other across the surface that will touch your skin. Liquid latex alone is not enough insulation to keep the voltage off your skin.

This guide was first published on Oct 09, 2013. It was last updated on Oct 09, 2013.

This page (Build Circuit) was last updated on Oct 07, 2013.

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