This past Saturday (2025-07-19) I went to Open Sauce. And since this is a maker event, I went with my best t-shirt so far: the Angler Fish.

But it had some issues that I wanted to fix before using it again.

angler_fish_tshirt

The two improvements that I made are:

  • Added a pocket to place the battery and the microcontroller
  • Improved how to attach the cables to the LED

The pocket

angler_fish_pocket

Instead of sewing the Lilypad Arduino microcontroller directly to the back of the t-shirt, I sewed a pocket in the back.

And I placed the microcontroller and the battery inside the pocket.

Verdict: Maybe happy with the result ? I need to improve my sewing skills, and I don’t know whether the pocket will get stuck in the washing machine. The back looks good.

angler_fish_back

The LED

angler_fish_led

For the LED, to make a secure connection, I used 3M Transpore Surgical Tape to attach the pins with the cables and the t-shirt.

Verdict: Very happy with the result. The LED was easy to detach it. The connection was solid.

The Arduino Sketch

The other change that I did, was to reduce the blinking frequency to 8 seconds.

// Arduino Sketch
void setup() {
  // Using pin 2 to drive the LED
  pinMode(2, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
  digitalWrite(2, HIGH);
  delay(1000);
  digitalWrite(2, LOW);
  delay(8000);
}

This post is 100% AI-free.