These were made specifically for burning man. They were Rogers idea and were very well received. I did all the sewing, some of the Arduino coding, and wiring them together. The design had a hood in the middle of the boa / scarf, that way it can be put up on the wearers head as shown. They also have a pocket sewn in at the bottom of the scarf. That was multi purpose, it held the battery packs, was very useful to keep hands warm since the desert gets cold at night, and made something to hold onto while dancing with it.

The length of the scarf is sewing into a tube so the outside is fuzzy all around. An addressable RGB strip is ran through that and we put 2 battery packs in each. That was in part to keep them full brightness the entire night, but also to keep the weight balanced so it doesn’t try sliding off one side all night.

We ran a modified version of the sample code that came with the library of the strips we were using. It had multiple effects built in, and we added in some code to randomly select which effect and which colors it would display. Then the other code modification was pretty brilliant by I think Nick that did an alpha fade between two effects to transfer between them smoothly. The last modification was the one I added that had a momentary switch that would lock it in an effect, so if you really like the effect that was running you could click the button and it would stay on that until the button pushed again to release and go back to random.

And I have to say, hippies tripping balls and dancing to EDM out in the desert LOVED the furry glowy warm thing they could dance with.

Another thing we learned from Alex was if you use RC car batteries (instead of the rechargeable AA batteries like I did) then it is VERY IMPORTANT to take those batteries out of the scarf before charging or they might light on fire and that’s a big bad, because his definitely lit on fire.

Unfortinately this was the only picture I found, but I know I had video of it somewhere, I’ll add that if I find it. Plus I still have it somewhere in a closet I think… Unless I gave it to my friend who kept going to the burn.