RaveShirt, the beginnings

So I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a Rave Shirt™ which would basically flash LEDs to the beat of the music. The idea is to eventually have this built into a shirt of some kind.

How I imagine this will work is I’ll attach a microphone to a microcontroller, use the ADC to get the data in then perform a FFT on the signal. Once that’s done I’ll run a quick loop over the results and find high amplitude signals then use those to drive the PWM output on the microcontroller.

I don’t know how this will look in the end, but I plan to try out different techniques and see what looks good.

So far I’ve ordered a single strip of LEDs and some P-Channel MOSFETs to test the basic concept. Unfortunately I didn’t think about how I’d drive the LEDs before I ordered them (it was mostly a cost based decision) so I ended up with common cathode diodes, thus the need for P-channel FETs to drive the high side.

For a Microcontroller I’m planning to prototype the system using the Cortex M3 based MBED since I have one handy and I’m familiar with it, however I plan to switch to the M4 based Stellaris due to it’s superior floating point performance (which should increase the performance of the FFT).

The prototype will be powered by a 12V wall wart with a regulator providing 5v for the MCU however in the next revision I plan to use lower power LEDs (3.3 or 5v if possible) and will move to batteries to make the project portable.

I’ll regularly update this as the project progresses, so stay tuned!