What I learned

What I made

My dream was to make LED light cubes that 'talk' to one another over Xbee. Slowly this dream faded, like the LED's connected in parallel with coin batteries and an XBee. I am proud of myself for failing as quickly and as successively as I did, because it means I was able to try lots of things pretty quickly. I found that the XBee's take 40mA of current and needed lithium polymer batteries (or a wired power connection), that the SoftwareSerial program won't entirely fit on an ATTiny44, so I should use Digital Input/Output (which works perfectly for LED's, in theory). I found myself frustrated by needed to always calibrate the accelerometer for what colors were what - it's very sensitive. So I decided that my project would be making things that I wanted to use. I made sketches for checking whether the accelerometers were wired up, and then a script for calibrating the cube yourself - so you can decide which faces are which colors. You can see that to calibrate the light blinks white four times, then shows you the colors as you move it around. Pressing the button inside lets you calibrate it any time you want.

The first (smaller) cube has no networking abilities - I made it as a failsafe because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to complete anything. The larger two have Xbee's - one on lithium polymer batteries, one on ftdi. The one on ftdi has no accelerometer because I ran out, and it's meant to be a follower. Currently it just flashes through all the colors. I have breakout boards for the XBee's and will keep trying over IAP to get them to talk. They work in Serial, but for LED's I can make cheaper circuits (no microcontroller necessary) with Digital Input/Output, and I'd like to get it working