Hi SparkFun,
I am really interested in the sewable LED ribbons (COM-14136), but I had several questions about them first. I would like them to be as bright as possible so that they could be seen in the daylight. Most videos that I find only have them illuminated in the dark. I saw that powering them off of two coin cells increased their brightness. But I want to make several costumes with them and would rather work with a chargeable lithium pack solution so that I don’t have to keep replacing coin cells. Can you recommend a lipo battery that will give me maximum brightness without burning out the ribbons? How would the brightness of these compare to LilyPad LEDs? Would I be better off sewing in many individual LilyPad LEDs for brightness?
Thanks
Unfortunately we don’t carry this product anymore but it was essentially just a bunch of Lilypad LEDs all soldered together on a pair of wires and stuck inside some ribbon.
The [fairy lights we carry are almost the same thing but don’t come with ribbon, you could use those inside some hollow ribbon to make your own. You probably would have trouble seeing these in daylight but they should be easy to see indoors and really easy to see in the dark.
Since these were designed to run from coin cells, they relied on the internal resistance of the coin cell to prevent burning out the LEDs. If you’re going to run these off a rechargeable battery you’d need some sort of current limiting resistor that keeps current through the string down to about 125mA max to prevent the LEDs from burning out.](Fairy Lights - Red (2.5m) - PRT-14503 - SparkFun Electronics)