Suit Jacket with 500 Blue LEDs

This suit jacket is decorated with over 500 blue single-color LEDs arranged in predominantly vertical columns on the front, back, sleeves, and collar. The spacing between lights is ~1 inch (2.5 cm) throughout the design. 

Each column is animated with a downward sequential fading pattern, with slight differences in speed between adjacent columns of lights to add a degree of randomness. This allowed us to use relatively simple sequencers to achieve the appearance of highly complex behavior.

When this jacket was made (in 2007), we were pushing the limits of the number of LEDs that could be reasonably mounted within a suit jacket, and also run for many hours on the same pack of AA batteries. 

video

This jacket was used as a featured prop in a television commercial for a technical college, with the tagline "Technology will get you noticed."  We certainly agree with that!  The video is shown below.