Rotation 6: LED - wrafab/taor GitHub Wiki
In this rotation we are working on LED projects. My first project is an acrylic board lighted from the bottom. I tried to play off of the quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is my design:
This is the real thing:
The sign is illuminated with the LED strip down bottom, which emits light and into the acrylic sheet. When a part of the acrylic is cut away, the light reflects off of the vertical cut and thus we can see the image. The LED strip is analog because there are no control to each pixel; it's just the entire strip on or off.
The second project I made was the animation necklace. Here is the video. After constructing the pendant, I also made my own animation by changing the arduino code. The arduino code is here and the H file is here.
My design was to have an animation where a smiley face turns into a swirl and disappears, like this:
The new animation looks like this.
The LED matrix receives the command to turn on or off each pixel LED from the aruino program (more specifically, the array of 1's and 0's in the H file) and orders each LED unit to light up or not. The common row anode and cathode are the two pins that are on the opposite side of each row (which we soldered to the LED backpack). They provide power for the LED units in each row.
Bootloader is a program that loads the code from the computer onto the microprocessor. Bootloaders are important with Gemma microprocessors because unlike other arduino products, Gemma does not load the arduino code from the computer by itself. Without the reset/bootload button, we would not be able to tell the processor to do anything.
The third project I did was the LED goggles. The video is here.
Here is me wearing the goggles.
I also added the bluetooth control to the goggles. Here is the video.
The goggles have 16 LEDs attached to the NeoPixel ring, and the microprocessor tells each LED whether to light up or not and what color it should emit.
My fourth project is the LED strip sound meter. The link is here.
My final LED project is using the LED MAX7219 matrix to run two animations. Although I did find a library for the matrix, I could not make the adjustment that allow the four pieces to show one animation together; the pieces just display their animation independently.
The first animation is daft punk and the second animation is Pac man.