LED Display Mask
There are numerous LED masks online with preprogrammed light patterns. What I want to do differently is to make a real time interface that can pixelate a pattern you draw on your phone and map it onto the mask.
Planning
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I am building a LED displayed helmet that can show different pixelated patterns controlled and interfaced with a phone.
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NeoPixel LED strip
a strip of RGB LED that can be individually addressable controlled by only one digital output pin which means an Attiny 85 will be enough to for the strip. One limitation with Attiny85 is the 512 bytes RAM which may not be enough for an array of LEDs which can each take up 3 bytes. For the time limit, I will be using Arduino UNO (Atmega 328) before I reduce the size of the board for this wearable device.
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Fabduino / Arduino
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external 5V DC power supply
Arduino can only give 500 milliamps to the 5V pin which is enough to power 8 leds at maximum brightness at the same time. The NeoPixel strip can drive up to 60mA per led. There is a number of options for the power supply. I decided to use a portable phone charger.
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ESP8266 Wifi modules (for interfacing with laptop or iphone) During the networking and communication week I have used APP Inventor to control an Arduino wirelessly through HC-05 module. Since this time, I want to do it through my iphone. This tutorial I found online is very useful.
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power capacitor and data line resistor so that I dont kill the first LED when I first plug the strip to the power.
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I have two halves of the helmet I made from the composite week. Though the interior finish of the helmet is very smooth, I still want use some cardboard to fill the interior so that it doesnt wabble on my head.
Programming
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Tutorial
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I have tried using the APP INVENTOR and HC-05 bluetooth modules for the interface and communication during the previous weeks. But as I nolonger possess an android phone, I will use processing and ESP8266
WorkFlow
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Previous assignments I believe have prepared well enough to get this thing at least working, so I went ahead and started with soldering the 2 meter led strips into a trapzoidal shape that fits my face.
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I got this error message when I tried to run serial communication with both of my Processing sketch and Arduino IDE turned on which obivously would make a conflict. "Error opening serial port '/dev/cu.usbmodem1421'. (Port busy)”
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The soldering process which I was quite comfortable with until this point as I did not pay attention to the wire size when I was connecting theneopixel strips together. The solder was ripped off the copper when I tryied to tape it on the helmet.
- I ended up not having enough time for making my own PCB to replace a big arduino. And the wireless network with ESP8266 was not successful. Since I had all the parts working in the previous weeks, I thought system integration would go very smoothly. However, as it turned out, every single integration between the two ran into some problems.
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What ended up working by Monday night was only a wire serial communication and a simple processing interface for the lED colors. I will defintely try to go further this winter and update it soon.
