{"id":15,"date":"2019-12-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-02T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/tweet-my-wedding-dress\/"},"modified":"2020-02-14T10:19:14","modified_gmt":"2020-02-14T09:19:14","slug":"tweet-my-wedding-dress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/frontend\/design-ux\/tweet-my-wedding-dress\/","title":{"rendered":"Tweet My Wedding Dress"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is the story of a unique wedding dress and her creator Jo Franchetti<\/b>, Tech Engagement Manager at Trainline. Jo\u2019s got 6 years experience as a front end developer and has worked in various parts of the tech industry from startups, agencies, charities to large organisations. Her opinions and experiences often turns into interesting and inspiring facts. She will also deliver a speech at Codemotion Madrid<\/strong> about Perfectionism, Impostor Syndrome and Anxiety – Understanding your fears and learning to be kind to yourself<\/em> (more information here<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, however, we present a very interesting and peculiar project that Jo presented during Codemotion Rome 2019<\/b>. The idea is conceptually simple: making a wedding dress that can change colour based on tweets<\/b>! Interesting, but not so simple to realise as one might think at first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In this article, we will try to summarise Franchetti\u2019s speech, to understand how this idea became a reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hardware requirements<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In order to create her dress, Franchetti started looking at some hardware<\/span> solutions to realise it. She needed LEDs<\/span> and some microprocessors to program them based on tweets – thus an Internet connection was also a requirement. There are many solutions to do this: Arduino and Raspberry Pi are probably two of the most common boards for electronic DIY, that can perfectly fit this case. However, for this project she opted for an Adafruit Feather Huzzah<\/b>, which she highlighted to be small, lightweight and well-documented. It also has a WiFi board to connect to the Internet and to receive information from Twitter. Moreover, it cost less than 20 dollars<\/b>. It seems a perfect choice indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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When looking at the LEDs<\/span>, many products are available out there. Among them, Adafruit also produces some individual programmable pixel LEDs<\/span><\/b>, namely Flora NeoPixels<\/b>, which seemed the best option considering the choice of basing the project on an Adafruit board. However, cost is also a crucial factor: for the dress, Franchetti needed about 100 NeoPixels, and this would have meant going over her budget. So she opted for a cheaper version<\/span> of the NeoPixels produced by Knockoff<\/b>, that also has the advantage of having a white-coloured background<\/span>, resulting in a better integration in her white wedding dress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Of course, she also needed other basic stuff that are quite common for makers, like soldering iron and solder, wires, glue gun and so on. She also needed some white tulle for integrating everything in her dress, but here we will try to focus more on hardware<\/span> and software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arduino IDE configuration<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Another great advantage of the Adafruit board is the possibility of programming it by means of the Arduino IDE<\/span><\/b> (version<\/span> 1.6.8 or greater, preferably the latest release). After downloading it from Arduino.cc<\/a>, we need to open the preferences and add the following URL<\/span> into Additional Board Manager URLs<\/span><\/i>:<\/p>\n\n\n

http:\/\/arduino.esp8266.com\/stable\/package_esp8266com_index.json<\/span><\/code><\/span>Code language:<\/span> JavaScript<\/span> (<\/span>javascript<\/span>)<\/span><\/small><\/pre>\n\n\n
Next, using the Board manager<\/b>, we have to install the ESP8266<\/i> package. This will take some minutes (depending on your Internet connection speed).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Finally, after rebooting the IDE<\/span>, we will find our Adafruit board under the Tools<\/i> menu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Once the configuration<\/span> is completed, we are ready to work on the board. The following snippet shows us how to test the WiFi connectivity and represents a good starting point for programming your own WiFi-based applications<\/span> on this board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n