Massive help needed with light up jacket idea

Projects General Guidance
1

Ok me and my friend are trying to put together a jacket like chris jericho has.

Here is the jacket (its about 30 seconds in)

Now we have the roughest of rough ideas on how it would work. We program the led sequence attach them to the arduino and then to the jacket.

However we have no clue of how to actually do this lol.

If someone could tell us what leds we would need,what wires and connectors we need, what sort of sequence it would be and how to program it in it would be the best thing ever. We have looked online to try and find out but nobody really explains how to do it from scratch.

We aren't massively fussed about the colours just lighting up white from bottom to top will be fine.

I know this is a pain for some people to explain because it may seem really simple to most of you but we are wanting to do it as a surprise for my fiancee at our wedding.

Again we don't need advice on the actual jacket making itself just the way of getting the sequence onto the less and getting them working all in the right order/direction.

thanks in advance

2

Check out AdaFruit's NeoPixels. They have an "Uber Guide" which explains a lot.

You'll likely need a soldering iron since I wouldn't trust conductive thread to carry all the current required by the LEDs.

You might want to power the microcontroller and the LEDs from a single LiPo cell. This would simplify the electronics a lot.

Look through AdaFruits site and pick out some parts you think you might use. Add links to the parts you're considering and we can let you know if we think the part or parts will work well for this project.

Usually the software is the hard part of a project but simple animations like those in the video are pretty easy. Here's my "Hypno Rings" animation. This is an animation I did for my hexacopter.

Make sure you check with us when it comes time to connect the LEDs together. The programming will be easier if you arrange the LEDs in a logical manner.

If someone doesn't offer to help write the code for free, you could probably pay someone $50 to $100 write it for you.