So yesterday evening at Lusio Light I saw someone gliding through the park wearing gossamer butterfly wings studded with shifting and glimmering blue/green lights. It was breathtaking.

And I'm realizing that I don't know if that costume would have even been possible 25 years ago. Probably technically yes, but the engineering would be a *massive* undertaking for one person.

Today, it's doable for well under fifty bucks of off-the-shelf consumer kit electronics.

Technology is cool sometimes.

These aren't just simple RGB LEDs. Each individual unit contains and integrated microcontroller, which reads digital serial signals on one or two shared wires. Each microcontroller sets LED color and brightness by turning each channel on and off at specific intervals, at least hundreds of times a second.

And the limiting factor on the size of each LED unit isn't the size of the parts, it's how small it can be soldered.