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!

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!