This RGB wedding dress mimics that of Princess Aurora from Sleeping Beauty

Inspired by the RGB lights of his Christmas tree, Brett Haddoak came up with the idea of ​​transforming his now-wife Rachelle's wedding dress into something out of the classic children's movie Sleeping Beauty by incorporating a series of RGB LED strips that would light it up elegantly, just like Princess Aurora's.

At first, Haddoak opted to simply remove the Christmas lights from her tree and attach them to the dress, but that turned out to be less than ideal as the covered area wasn't enough. Additionally, the app that controls the string lights was unreliable, necessitating a DIY solution. His initial test involved taking a few WS2812B strips, wrapping them around a chair, and testing a blue to pink transition animation made by an Arduino Nano and the FastLED library. This concept went pretty well, so Haddoak took the next step of embedding the lights into the fabric and playing with the brightness.

Once he was done laying out all the hardware and refining the colors, Haddoak used 1,200 LEDs all over the dress. The high power consumption forced him to add a pair of battery banks that could supply about 6A in total, and since the Arduino could only control a maximum of 600 LEDs before running out of memory, Haddoak also connected a second Nano for the other 600.

Although there were a few hiccups along the way, the result was amazing according to Haddoak. Watch the video below to see the color-changing dress in action, and be sure to read more about the fairy tale project here on her blog.