Blinky Earrings & Necklace

What Is It?

This was an early foray into wearable electronics for me, as well as a test to see how much battery life I could squeeze out of a coin cell. I originally wrote the software for this low-powered blinker for an entirely different project, but the concept is malleable enough to be reshaped into many different forms.

The Crafts Side

One of the big troubles of miniaturizing electronics if figuring out where to hide the battery. I instead opted to make the battery part of the piece itself. The earrings are connected to it with a few feet of speaker wire and hot glued at the ends to provide some insulation.

The Technology Side

Instead of using a blinker circuit made from discrete parts, I opted to use a microcontroller to minimize the number of parts involved in order to shrink the final product. I opted for a PIC16 due to their reputation for excellent low-power performance and enabled as many power saving settings as I could.