I made an LED wizard robe as my introduction to WLED! I’ll share with you what I’m using and what I have learned!
I have 576 LEDs (4 full strips of 144 led/m, I believe ws2812b, definitely a 3-wire strip). I chose strips that were sealed in IP67 housings to try to gain some additional strain relief. Overall, this choice worked relatively well! It took ~2 years and over 100 hours of wearing across maybe 20 sessions before a strip became damaged.
I power it with a USB 3.0 capable battery bank, specifically this 20000mAh INIU. I get WAY more than 3 hours of run time with this setup, much closer to 12 hours. I purchased a USB breakout connector with screw terminals, and I have that wired directly to the LEDs and Vin on the 8266. Beware that many of these battery banks are designed to turn off their output if the current draw is too low, and a single esp may not draw enough to keep the pack on when the lights are off. This pack (at least mine) has a mode that allows you to defeat this, but my 2 8266s draw enough to keep my pack on anyway.
I do not use a level shifter, my LEDs are not fused, and I do not inject power anywhere other than at the first strip. This is pretty solidly against the recommendations you’ll commonly get here, but it works well for me! I do use the “automatic brightness limiter” setting, configured to ~3A (which I believe is the standard for USB3.0). If you choose a pack that has output protection against shorting (mine does), you could slowly increase the limit until the protection engages to find out exactly where your maximum is.
I used esp8266 for my build, but I did not use the audio-reactive builds. If AR is your goal, ESP32 would be the most obvious choice, as the new builds support that board. The 8266 is no longer officially supported for AR, but there are definitely older revisions which will allow you to use an 8266 if you require its small form-factor. Either way, take a very careful read of the AR Kno.wled.ge page and the AR github wiki in order to make sure you choose an appropriate microphone. Alternatively, some folks buy off-the-shelf controllers that are audio reactive and flash WLED onto them, and some other folks here make and sell pre-made boards which already contain a working microphone (like the dig2go) - Do a little research and see if one of those would suit your needs!
I had stability issues connecting to the built-in Access point, it would repeatedly deny my connections right when I was trying to show it off! To get around this, I actually installed a second 8266 which does nothing but act as a wireless router. For one reason or another, this solved my connection problems. This may have been a bug related to my older revisions (my robes are running Toki), or to limitations of the 8266 I don’t know about, but be prepared to need to do this if wireless access is important to you.
Lastly, and possibly most importantly, I installed a potentiometer which allows me to control the global brightness. I wear my robes to outdoor festivals and indoor concerts alike, and I absolutely needed the ability to turn the brightness down quickly as to not disturb my fellow concert-goers. I took the robes out once without that potentiometer installed, immediately lost my connection to the 8266, and could plainly see I was making other people uncomfortable turned all the way up. Most other builds you’ll find here are looking to put out as much brightness as possible, but you will likely find that a lower brightness is just as pretty, and far more comfortable, in a wearable. The “Macros” and “Global Brightness” sections at the bottom of the macros page contains more info on setting up this potentiometer. I have both my 8266s and my potentiometer housed in an Altoids tin for that extra DIY-street-cred.
I bought a connector kit to make my own harnesses with connectors that mate to the original connectors. I recommend going this route - it has allowed me to carry spare harnesses with me and replace broken wires mid-festival. This also allowed me to re-organize my strips to put the damaged strip at the end of circuit, which kept the rest of my robes working perfectly. Make sure you heat-shrink ALL your connections and connectors, and double wrap them if you can! Cable strain has been the #1 issue I’ve experienced since finishing the robes.
There’s a crappy video of my robes here if you are interested! Good luck, let us know if you have more questions, and please take videos and post them so we can see what you make!