Invalid Function » Programming

Long Time No Talk

Andrew — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 09:07:43 +0000

I’ve been busy with school and now Im in the process of applying to some entry-level engineering jobs but one of them wanted me to record a video of my “Blinder”s

So, here they are in action for everyone in the world to see. Check out the full youtube page to see all of the juicy technical details. If this gets popular enough I’ll take some pictures but right now I’m way too lazy to get them off the wall and find a suitable camera. But for now, Enjoy!

Blinder Progress Report

Andrew — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:24:54 +0000

So, to continue with my obsession with lighting, I wanted to design my own high brightness wall washer. It had to be overkill though, that’s just how I roll! My project is named the “Blinder,” for obvious reasons. One unit has 8 high brightness 3W multicolor LED’s mounted to a long aluminum backplating. The system pulls approximately 8.4 amps at 5V (42 watts) during full brightness. Since I am cheap, I’m using a 300w ATX power supply I ripped from an old computer. I can control the unit wirelessly using Xbee which talks to an AVR microcontroller which controls the LEDs via an LED Driver (Texas Instrument’s TLC5947). All of these components are mounted onto a custom-designed PCB I had manufactured at Gold Phoneix PCB. To top all of the insanity, I’m making 3 of these! Yea, you’re right.. I just cranked it to 11.

The build is currently a work in progress. I have only started to finish one of them. Since it is final’s week, I haven’t had much time to work on them. I will post the full source code, schematics, and videos sometime after Christmas break. Until then, enjoy the timelapse footage of me building the LED drivers one at a time with a short video of one set running the demo software.

So far I would like to thank TNTech’s Baja Team (specifically Frank Smith) for letting me use their shop and helping me with the metal forming. Mwhaha

Edit: I found a bug in my firmware used in testing that reduces the brightness by a half (I needed one more bit shift!) – so the video at the end of the timelapse doesn’t do much justice anymore!

Arduino Controlled Music Lights!

Andrew — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:19:13 +0000

About 3 months ago, I had the most random idea — I wanted a real time music visualizer. However, I just didn’t have the time to do the research necessary for this project because of homework. Well, now that I am on spring break, I decided to make a reality. And it worked! The first time too!

There are two sides of this project, the hardware and the software. The hardware part was the easy part. Mike had an Arduino board laying around and I went to radioshack to buy a relay, a 9 volt battery, a diode, and a transistor. Thats basically all that is needed for the hardware side. I used the schematic found on http://www.glacialwanderer.com/hobbyrobotics/?p=9 to make sure I’m doing everything right. Putting this together only took about 2 hours.

The software side was a little bit more tricky. I tried two differently languages: MATLAB and C#. Both turned out to be quite a big failure. Then I stumbled upon Processing, which is basically an extension onto Java that made it easy for visual artists to create programs. Processing included a library called Minim, which had lots of built in features for audio analysis. I used the beat detection algorithm from Minim and then used that to send a signal to the Arduino board over USB to turn on or off the lights.

Basically thats all! Later I plan to find a better relay, something that lasts longer [solid state relay?], and then put it in a box so it is safer and looks better.

For now, enjoy the video!