Reviewing from two weeks ago
I got somewhat excited about programming while building the board, so I wrapped this week's section last time.
And here's the result at this point
I watched this video along the way.
Blink
To test the board, I used the classic Arduino IDE's blink example:
And here's the result
Next step, using the button
Playing with Libraries
The reason to use the Arduino IDE is getting to use all the libraries it offers. So the first thing was to play with Adafruit's NeoPixels' library. Coz it's cool. I used a simple LED strip and wrote some code to randomly assign colors and patterns to the diodes.
Playing with Copper
This week gave me a nice excuse to use the vinyl cutter to play with copper.
Using the laser-cutter, I built a small box to hold the LEDs. The vinyl cutter was useful in both creating the stars-pattern to cover the lamp and in creating the copper circuit itself
Here's plan A
of course I failed miserably trying to put it in its appropriate position. It's harder than it looks like. After some few iterations and soldering, here's the working final circuit:
And of course, the final programming process: creating a sin function that would "rotate" LEDs in four different clusters, hopefully creating a sensation of movement
Of course it didn't work: I hadn't realized that two of my free pins were just purely digital and wouldn't allow "analogWrite". Here's some improvisation and the week's result: