Animated Necklace with LED

With the maker faire this month I decided to make some bling to bring. Having made 80 of these necklaces in august that I brought with me to burning man this year, the process is now super refined and easy. The cost to make one of these is very cheap, bordering on about 1.50 each. But the coolness factor is off the charts. At burning man I had a box of several colors of LED’s as well as some color fading ones. The color fading ones were by far the most popular. Anyway here is the how to…

The Acrylic:

For this project we will be using 2 thicknesses of acrylic. A .220 – .250 and a .120 – .125 thickness. Acrylic is ideal for this project over lexan for instance due to how it plays with the light from the LED’s.

The LED’s:

For this project you will need one 5mm led of your color. As stated before the color fading ones are very cool, UV will have a very short run time, 8-16 hours and red leds the longest run time.

Screw :

The screws you will want for this project are about .120 and .450 long. Ideally they will have a flat head on them so the don’t stick out to far. You can use what you have laying around or hit the home center for ideas and a minor price gouging.

Battery:

We picked up these batteries on ebay for about .50 each in larger lots. The 3V CR2026 is the ideal thickness for this project and should last 3-7 days in these necklaces.

A Pattern:

For this project we used Corel draw… yes I said Corel draw… Wow… one more time to reaffirm to myself… Corel draw… ok… that’s X4 if anyone cares to know. This app believe it or not is very very good for rapid pattern dev and works very will with the epilog mini systems. It also will export any format under the sun and is natively supported by Ponoko. Here is the file for this pattern(right click, save as).

So here we go. The laser is raster etching the words and vector cutting the top layer of the necklace that holds the LED and the pattern we want to display. The epilog mini 45 system realy zips through this material with ease.

Click here for the rest of the project.