Suit of Light Prototype
The Suit of Light is a reflective fireman's jacket covered with 161 high-intensity light emitting diodes (LEDs). When fully illuminated it consumes 7 watts and is bright enough for a whole book club to read by. As you can see in the animation above—It has finished loading, hasn't it?—a pattern of stripes moves back and forth across the jacket.
These controls are on the left front pocket. The red button lights up the jacket's right cuff (blue LEDs) and starts a new stripe moving from right to left. The black button allows stripes arriving at the right cuff to "fall off" instead of bouncing back. Adding and removing stripes with these buttons lets the wearer create any desired pattern. The knob adjusts the speed from one step per second to an impossible-to-follow blur.
Eight D batteries, located in the right front pocket, can
power the Suit of Light for many hours.
Alternatively, a standard 12 volt connector plugs into a car cigarette lighter.
Wearing the Suit of Light in a convertible at night definitely attracts attention, but all the moving colors
make traffic signals easy to miss.
Be careful out there.
Inside the control box is the sort of electronic rat's nest that results when ex-physicists think they're
electrical engineers.
In the lower right is a switching power supply that provides 5V for the logic board in the upper left.
Bits representing lit stripes circulate in a 32-bit shift register with its last stage looped back to
its first.
Each pair of positions equidistant from the ends of
the register is OR'ed together to drive a transistor on the board in
the upper right, which in turn switches one of the 16 bands of LEDs on the jacket.
Dangerous Interactive Systems has recently enhanced our Suits of Light to allow them to communicate with each other. When wearers of Model 2 suits hold hands, one continuous pattern is formed across both jackets. Stay tuned to this web site for photos and movies of this effect, or let us know that you would like more information.
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