Space Sombrero

For Halloween I decided to put some LEDs controlled by an MSP430 on a sombrero. Unfortunately, I did not finish in time to take it to the Halloween party at our hackerspace but I did finish working on it the last week.

The LEDs are soldered in three 4x4 matrixes, one matrix for each color. My plan was to combine red, green, and blue into one point diffused with ping pong balls. In the end I skipped the diffusers. The LEDs are bright enough on their own. They are taken from a string of Christmas tree lights so the total of 48 LEDs cost about a dollar. Something like NeoPixels (WS2812) would have been better for this project but would have been much more expensive.

Each color is run by its own 74HC595 shift register, so only one LED per color can be on at a time. This reduces apparent brightness when several LEDs are driven by PWM but is still brighter than using only one matrix for all the LEDs. With a 1k resistor they are very bright, which I noticed when experimenting with them before. Everything is controlled by a small PCB. Each matrix is connected to a Cat5 ethernet cable which has four twisted pairs, exactly enough to multiplex 16 LEDs. The two knobs control speed and color of the patterns and a button switches between patterns. Altogether the hardware is really simple, though there were some headaches soldering the board. The legs of the potentiometers are very weak so I soldered header pins to the back of them for stability. They are really sturdy now but Vcc was shorting through the body of the potentiometers. Once I fixed that, there still showed only about 4k resistance between ground and Vcc. A tiny fleck of solder on the metal body of the power switch was also causing a short. After fixing that there was still a 33k resistance between ground and Vcc. Desocketing and unsoldering narrowed it down to the L4931 voltage regulator. Several other L4931s I measured had the same resistance. After putting everything back together, it worked fine.

The potentiometers and knobs for them came from my local electronics store. They are logarithmic, although linear would work much better for communicating speed to the microcontroller. Converting the curve mathematically seemed pretty tricky, so I used a look up table of a few measured values instead. After soldering the potentiometers onto the board, I realized that the seven values I measured were not enough, so I plotted them on a graph and extrapolated more points. The values I came up with work pretty well, though when changing colors the distances between points don't feel exactly even. The next time I use potentiometers like this I will try to do a lot more exact measuring before soldering them so the points will be more even.

Here is a short video of a few patterns I programmed in. You can see how the speed and color knobs work. There is a lot of room left in the flash for more patterns but this is enough to consider the project finished.