Summary

I wanted a blinky thing to wear at a recent art festival. I was also gifted a 25 pixel strand of adafruit's really cool ws2801 pixels, so I printed a thing, wired it to a teensy, wrote a little arduino code, added a little bluetooth serial module, and plugged it in to a cell phone charging USB battery.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNr0QmHUDL4&feature=youtu.be

Instructions

So first I printed 25 boxes and a bunch of clips. I printed the clips a dozen at a time and wanted extras, so I just printed them until I had enough. I put a dab of super glue on each one to hold it better.

Then I hooked up the wires to my teensy. I'm using a teensy 2.0. There are more wiring details in the code, which is over on github: https://github.com/bobiam/Adafruit-WS2801-Library/tree/master/examples/ws2801_5x5 - depending on which arduino clone you're playing with, the wiring details might change. It's simple though, you want to power the LEDs separately, clock and data go to a couple outputs of your board, serial bluetooth (I'm using a JY-MCU) hooks to the hardware serial on your board. If you have questions, feel free to ask in the comments.

Unplug your printer before programming your arduino. I flashed my printrboard with blinky light code and it didn't like it at all. Don't do that.

The code is thrown together, but you're welcome to play with it. The bluetooth is stupid simple. It listens for a character and:
1) sets that as the new pattern
2) sends feedback via serial of what pattern it is starting.
for a menu, read the code, or send "ls" (noquotes) to the teensy.

FYI - I'm using Blueserial on android to control mine: http://android.lisisoft.com/apps-android-phone/628264-com.blueserial.html

LED strand: http://www.adafruit.com/products/322

In all, it took:
25 printed cubes
40 printed clips
42 zipties
1 strand of LED pixels
1 teensy 2.0
1 jy-mcu bluetooth serial module
1 foot of wire
a few inches of solder
3 feet of paracord (I wore it like a necklace)