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.

Progress Report (Sort Of)

So I have not updated my blog in a while. Grad school is keeping me pretty busy. Most of what I do with electronics now is related to the local hackspace I joined. I was able to use some tools there to shorten the bolts for the case of my RPN Scientific Calculator and I also have access to a laser cutter and 3D printer that I eventually want to use to make keys for it. One of the members there and I decided to start on a project together. We have not made enough progress yet to post about but we did finish a schematic of what we plan to do. For this we have both EPROMs and EEPROMs. The EPROMs have a small window and can be erased with UV light, though the lamp we have does not seem to be working. They would also need a higher voltage source to write them and I want to make a voltage multiplier when time allows. If I can get that working, it might also help me with another project that needs -27 volts for LCD contrast.

Another neat thing I have experimented with at the hackerspace is the Spark Core. One of our members was able to get a hold of several of these for us. These tiny little boards let you connect a microcontroller to Wi-Fi pretty painlessly. This would work really well for a project idea I have that I have not started on yet. One thing I don't like is the Arduino-like environment used to program them with but I think I could get used to it since I would probably use my own microcontroller for everything but Wi-Fi. Another idea would be to simply use the CC3000 chip the board uses without the Spark Core board, though that may be too complicated to be worth it. It seems that the newer Spark Photon uses a different chip which could be easier to use by itself, though Spark Photons are not scheduled to ship until March.

One thing I have been working on on my own is a sombrero with LEDs. It was supposed to be part of a Halloween costume, but I did not finish it in time. Each color (red, green, and blue) is soldered as a 4x4 matrix that has its own shift register. It might have been possible to solder all 48 LEDS (16 each of red, green, and blue) as a 6x8 matrix and use one less shift register, but this way lets me keep each LED on three times longer. NeoPixels would have worked well for this project but just one of them costs almost as much as all of the LEDs. The board for controlling everything is finished. Now all the LEDs just need to be sewed to the sombrero and the firmware written to control their flashing. In order to save time I only soldered buttons to the board for controlling the patterns of the LEDs, but I do have some nice potentiometers I bought that I now have time to use instead. Reading their value with an MSP430 worked great on the first try and I displayed it on my one wire debug display.