Wearable Lab Coat TV Packs Thousands of LEDs

It’s like a TV. but you can wear it. David Forbes made this Video Coat contraption by gluing thousands of LEDs to a lab coat making it a wearable wrap-around display.

The Video Coat is a 160 by 120 pixel color LED display built using flex boards connected by flat flex cables. The display is split into clusters of three LED panels, and each display strip has four columns. The coat’s power is supplied by two 11.1-volt, 5 Amp-hour R/C LiPo packs that provide about an hour of operational time.

The video comes from a Video iPod (Classic, we’re guessing) connected to an RCA output. The shoulders of the coat are equipped with the video conversion circuitry--a Xilinx FPGA that converts the YCrCb signal from the TVP5154 video digitizer into four RGB serial data streams. On the left shoulder is a knob for adjusting the color and brightness, and for turning the picture to black & white.

Forbes has been building the video coat for the last six months and spent about $20,000 on the project. But it’s not finished yet--the arms will have video panels as well and the cables still need to be tucked inside. If you’re heading down to Burning Man, expect Forbes to be there in his video coat. Cathode Corner has more photos and information for your viewing and reading enjoyment.