The project's objective was to make a tshirt with an LED matrix behind it to be able to change the look of the shirt on demand from a phone app. I never got around to making the app but had a python script that outlined how to interact with the t-shirt over a wifi interface.
I used an ESP8266 board connected to a hotspot which was able to recieve color codes for each of the LEDs on the 16x16 led matrix on the chest area of the tshirt. The script allowed me to play animations on the tshirt by changing the image periodically.
The whole project was mostly spawned out of boredom during winter break 2022 which led to the idea generation and execution of this project over 3 days. A lot of problems I experienced during this project were related to the LEDs not working and then not looking good due to the ommission of a diffusion layer. These were both fixed in the prototyping phase.
This was also the first time I had programmed for an ESP board to recieve messages over WiFi. There was a lot of time spent to optimize the time between sending messages and having the display update. The most efficient method was to send a long string encoded in hex which contained the state for each led. The implementation contained methods to update the entire matrix or any single pixel to make changes easier.