[Cyborg] LED fur coat

[Eric Boyd]

This is everywhere now so you might have seen it, but it's so awesome I 
have to give it a link:

http://rgbledcoat.blogspot.com/

Arren looks very familiar, I think I may have met him once.

He made the wiring simple by using a board-mounting ribbon snap and 
custom boards.  The RGB LEDs he got at an excellent price from Evil Mad 
Scientists.  If you look at the led wiring photo, you can see that he 
has strung the common lines across while the 3 led wires are strung 
down.  This presumably allows him to address each LED individually by 
pulsing the common lines.  32 rows of 8 LEDs each (hence 1/8th duty 
cycle), 36-bit color depth.  Clever and not that that hard to wire. 
It's not clear to me what the large red wires do, anyone know?

He doesn't say what he used as batteries, but he does say that (a) it 
draws 5 amps at 5 volts! and (b) he tried using AA batts, but caused one 
of them to leak!  I think perhaps he still uses AA batts, he's just more 
careful about turning on all the LEDs at once.

Anyway, I think it's a cheaper solution than the iPhone controlled LED 
suit that I linked last month - but more work.

Eric