Bowie

Akshay Baweja
2 min readNov 22, 2018

Bowie is an LED Bowtie designed to be used as a wearable in parties, DJs, etc. It is based on ATMega328 controller, WS2812 LEDs and a BLE. It has a highly optimised design and can run continuously for 12 hours. It houses an onboard charging ciruit as well, so, you can just plug in your regular micro usb charger to charge bowie. Bowie has 28 individually addressable LEDs which makes the real magic happen and can produce millions of colors at once.

Bowie — Front Side consisting of 28 LEDs (WS2812)

Bowie is an open-source design so you can design, moderate and code your own animations. You can also contribute to animations so everyone could use it. Since Bowie uses an ATMega328 you can program it using Arduino IDE itself which makes it super easy to program and handle.

Bowie Backside — consisting of BLE (Top Left), ATMega328 (Bottom Left) and Charging Module (Center)

Bowie was created when me and my friends had an idea of LED Tie but we ended up making an LED Bowtie. I know LED Tie would be cool. I might work on it next. I have a love for LEDs and RGB LEDs are just like the cherry on cake. I love creating projects with a-lot of LEDs on it glowing in a shiny bright animation. Currently, me and my friends are working on Android and iOS app for it. It will have OTA animation updates using BLE. We’re also planning to introduce a mesh network communication between multiple bowie in the neighbourhood. This can help DJs in EDM concerts to blast a colour wave and sync all bowie to the drops and beats.

That’s bowie for you 🔥

Do clap if you loved it and feel free to contribute to the project.

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Akshay Baweja

A creative technologist interested in exploring non-screen based human computer interactions