Light Power Test

To get started with the project I first confirmed the Arduino could reliably control the LEDs. I’d successfully powered the LEDs before, but only with another controller and it looked broken because the LEDs had so many glitches. So I soldered all my RGB LEDs into one strip and uploaded a simple FastLED demo onto the Arduino:

^{First time powering the strip - careful with the order (LEDs before Arduino) to avoid damaging the Arduino}

A single moving light may not be enough to reveal problems with the setup so I wrote a quick demo involving all 88 light modules changing colour:

^{A more demanding (and appealing) demo to further test the Arduino’s ability, powered by USB from a Raspberry Pi}

I checked the Arduino could be powered by USB from the Raspberry Pi (it can) then thought about the schematics… Arduino isn’t a powerful computer so the RPi should process the image/colours and send the data serially. This isn’t completely straight-forward due to interrupt problems described here.

There are ways of overcoming the interrupt issues with Arduino serial communication with further testing, so to aid further development I installed resinOS on the RPi. With that, I got a container working that automatically updates Arduino remotely (see here). I’m confident it will help progress as it’s already running FastLED and PySerial libraries in Docker (although there isn’t yet anything physical to show for it).

Real CAD/CAM enclosure prototypes coming soon…

For Physical Computing (IS53030B)…