Hello again!
Thanks for answering my other post. Your answers were very helpful.
I read Leah Buechley “make your own wearable LED display” Web page: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~buechley/diy/diy_tank.html and I think it may have the solution to my problem. I need to make a display with 48 LEDs and have an individual control of each LED. But I need to use Xbee for a wireless communication between two or more displays of LED.
And I'm not sure if it is possible to reverse voltage using a LilyPad or a LilyPad Xbee.
Can it be done? How can I do it?
Anyone knows another way to individually control 48 LEDs using only one LilyPad or LilyPad Xbee?
My LED display will be sewn on a t-shirt, so I'm trying to have as less components as I can. But if use some extra component was the solution, I'll do it. What do you suggest?
To power the LEDs I was thinking to use batteries because they are portable and cheap.
Try to search the forum for LED matrix driver. I think it is possible to hook your LED's up as a matrix with 8 rows and 6 coloumns an drive them with a matrix driver IC. I havent tried this myself, but lot's of people in the forum have made 8 by 8 LED matrices.
Say you have column 1 of your matrix hooked up to pin 2 on the LilyPad and a row 1 hooked up to pin 3. To turn on the light at row 1 column 1 you would set row 1 HIGH and column 1 LOW.
To reverse the voltage through the light at row 1 column 1 you would simply reverse this. That is, you would set row 1 LOW and column 1 HIGH.
Hope that's helpful!
ps - You don't want to mess with matrix drivers on fabric. Attaching them to fabric will be much harder than driving the matrix with the lilypad. The original tank top instructions almost directly transfer to the lilypad. If you start working through that tutorial w/ actual stuff you can figure things out I think. Good luck!!
Here's how I did the equivalent without using any external components apart from the LEDs (already packaged in a matrix in my case): Arduino Playground - DirectDriveLEDMatrix