Modular Extensible Reconfigurable Dress
Day-for-Night, an hommage to Paco Rabanne as well as a celebration of the beauty of electronics, is a modular, reconfigurable dress comprised of 444 white circuit boards (although the number changes as the dress can get longer or shorter). Each tile is designed in such a way as to accommodate a solar cell, a RGB LED, or a photocell, and jumper connectors (in the form of 0 Ohm resistors). A control board provides power, communicates with the tiles, and links to a computer via RF. The dress is completely modular both in terms of software and hardware.
A USB board provides virtual serial port to Windows, Macs and Linux while an on board microcontroller relays data to and from the dress via a 2.4 GHz RF link. This allows for programmability (and status monitoring) from the computer side in the form of simple commands and responses via the virtual serial port. Currently a Max program has been developed that provides a graphical user interface for programming the tiles, while a Flash and Java program are part of future developments.
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