Does anyone here have experience driving serial LED arrays?

I wanna be the glowiest fox that's ever foxed.

I'm fairly confident in the mechanical construction, less so on the coding.

Okay so the overall plan here is to vacu-form a fox mask out of translucent plastic, then glue a bunch of addressable LEDs to the inside of the mask and drive 'em with a microcontroller.

First step is probably making sure the vac forming works out? Need to pick a plastic. Want something thermoformable, translucent, a little bit flexible, and able to be glued to with silicone or hot glue.

Maybe polystyrene?

This totally means I'm planning to hand-solder several dozen 5mm SMT LEDs, while they're glued in place to a plastic that melts.

I'm hoping this is ambition and not just foolishness :)

I should probably spin up a Replica Prop Forum account to ask a lot of these questions :)

Then again, I don't actually know if original builds fall under that site's purview...

Today @rowanyote and I got a vacu-form box about half finished. Gonna use a cannibalized IR space heater which should warm the plastic really evenly.

Huh, this might be the first time I've built my own tool.

Neat :)

Blehh, trying to find a place to durably post about this project and ask for build advice.

The Replica Prop Forum clearly has the institutional knowledge I need but really does look purely for reproductions of existing media, not original builds. I've looked at two generalist cosplay forums and every post on the front page has half the posts with zero replies and the other half with less than ten. That doesn't seem promising.

I just wanna figure out what kind of plastic to use...

Knowing there's people who would be happy to help, but that it's inaccessible because I'm making my own art and not copying something extrant... yeah that's actually incredibly frustrating to me.