interface and application programming

For my final project, I am going to attempt the gazebo v2, the portable, drama-enhancing gazebo. I want to build a bigger gazebo this time, and use electronics to create the dramatic idealized mood from the covers of romance novels.

I want to create lighting in the gazebo that takes sunsets and makes them richer and more dramatic looking, like from the book covers. For this week, my plan was to design a board with many rbg leds on it and then program the colors to change like a sunset. Here are some example skies from romance novels:

For the design of the board, I was inspired by the ornaments on this woman's dress from a romance novel. I am hoping to make many of these and have them be controlled indepedently by another board (hopefully during networking week):

Because I designed most of this board at home for Thanksgiving break, I used the rgb led from the fab library in Eagle without realizing that I was using the wrong part. We don't actually have these in the shop, so I will have to go back to redesign my board next week.

I designed a two-sided board with all the lights on the bottom side. Routing traces around the rgb leds is tricky because there is so little space, and I ended up adding many 0 ohm resistors to my schematic to make jumps.

Bottom of board:

Top of board:

I really wanted to try milling it anyways, but I couldn't find any large pieces of material to mill or double-sided material, so I will have to try this again next week!

I ended up using my simple rgb led board from output week instead, but the same code should work with my star-shaped board later. The files needed to make this board can be found here.

I attached a wire to an unused pin on the attiny to connect using FTDI, and I then used the SoftwareSerial library in the Arduino environment.

I then used the serial library in Processing to talk to my board. I looped through all the pixels in an image, grabbed the color, and told the board to change the led to that color. I also had the led change colors when you click with a mouse.

But the colors were not looking right! I thought the orientation of my led was wrong, so I tried turning it, which also meant I had to swap some of the resistors around. This still wasn't working, so I ended up changing it out for another kind of rgb led that someone gave me. The new led got me closer...the led turns red and blue correctly, but the green was not turning on. I checked the connections, but still haven't gotten it to work as hoped yet.

Here is a video of the led changing colors as Processing loops through an image, though the colors aren't quite right: