By popular demand, we now have a project tutorial for how to make your own programmable, ultra-blinky LED belt. Perfect for parties, raves, parades, weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs. Wear it with pride, wear it with blinky! Follow our soldering tutorial to build your own heirloom LED belt, and hand it down to your grandkids.

See the digital programmable LED belt in action on Flickr!

We designed this project to demonstrate how to use the digital LED strip, how to use our Atmega32u4 breakout board with the Arduino IDE and how to make a portable battery powered project that runs off of AAs. This project is not too difficult, and can be finished in a day. Some soldering experience is good since 'free wire' soldering is a little more difficult than soldering to a PCB, but even beginners should be able to manage. We don't include a tutorial on using the Arduino IDE so its good if you've played around with the Arduino already.

The pack contains the following:

• Atmega32u4 breakout board (the brains!)
• Digital LED strip - 1 meter - LPD8806 has full color PWM for fantastic ranges of color!
• 6-pin IDC cable
• Inline cable pair (male and female)
• 4xAA battery holder with a switch
• 1N4001 diode
• 3" of 3/32" heatshrink
• 4" of 1" heatshrink
• Zip/cable tie

You'll need some very common electronics tools to make this project

• A soldering iron and solder
• Wire cutters and wire stripper (or a tool that does both)
• Heat source like a heat gun, hairdryer, or lighter
• Any kind of pliers
• A 3rd hand tool or panavise or some other way to keep your work steady
• A basic multimeter can be handy

You'll also few more things to complete and power the project: a very common mini-B USB cable (for programming the belt) and 4 AA batteries for powering it. You can use alkaline or rechargeables. The belt will last for 6-12 hours depending on what designs you program in - more LEDs will drain the batteries faster.

Be sure to see the full detailed tutorial over at the project page