Make an LED glowing prom dress using RP2040

Want to sparkle on the dance floor and be the shining star of the ball (literally)? Brighten up the room by creating your own light-up dress.

The image shows a portrait of a young girl with long, dark hair and expressive eyes. She is wearing a black dress with glowing lights under the skirt and is posed against a simple, muted background. The lighting is soft, highlighting her facial features and creating a warm, gentle atmosphere. The overall mood of the image is serene and contemplative
All the images are borrowed from Angelina’s Hackster post

Angelina Tsuboi created an LED glowing prom dress using our RP2040 with the help of her friend Ayesha’s gorgeous PCB designs. This dress took just four hours to make. So if you’re rushed for time and don’t know what to wear for prom, why not copy this maker’s idea?

Hardware 

  • Custom constellation NeoPixel PCBs (schematic available on Hackster)
  • Adafruit diffused LED strip
  • Charge bank
  • 2 × RP2040
  • Dress (doesn’t have to be black tulle if that’s not your colour, but I do like Angelina’s style)

The process

Angelina started by sketching a schematic of the dress’s wiring. A charge bank in her pocket powers the entire system. She used one RP2040 chip to control the LED strip, and another to control the constellation PCBs. She soldered the constellation PCBs together in a chain before connecting them to an RP2040.

Adafruit’s NeoPixel library helped Angelina customise the behaviour of the colour LEDs shining under the dress’s skirt. She programmed a solid purple colour and used the Arduino coding editor to flash it to the RP2040 that controls the constellation PCBs. The LED strip was connected to another RP2040 preloaded with LED colour animations. Then the only thing left to do on the electronics side of things was to connect everything to the charge bank for power.

The LEDs glued to the underside of Angelina’s skirt

The last step was to glue the LED strip and PCB chain onto the dress with superglue. To see the steps for this dress code (haha) in more detail, be sure to check out Angelina’s post.