unwiredben

A few weeks ago, I sent off the 1.3 version of my RGB LED Shield to get fabbed. It was waiting for me when I returned from the Mozilla All-Hands meeting in California, but when I'd put it all together, it didn't work. I started checking soldering joints and electrical connections and discovered the problem; two rows of pins were swapped in my board layout, so it wasn't connecting the right pins to the Arduino. Because of the way that the TLC5490 pins are connected to special timer outputs, I couldn't fix this in software. I tried to see if I could reroute the signals on the board, but it didn't seem possible, However, I was able to verify that if I connected the board up with wires to the right pins, it did work.

Fast forward a couple of weeks. I'd gotten in a little board called the Stickduino. It's a small Arduino-compatible board that is about the size of a Flash drive. One end is a USB port, although it's not quite thick enough to make good contact in my laptop. I fix that with a couple of pieces of cardboard and a glue stick. I uploaded my arrows sketch to the board, then wired it up to the 1.3 RGB shield. The solid core wire was stiff enough to hold things in place, and it worked when I plugged it into my laptop.

To power this, I got out a $5 USB power supply I'd picked up on my California trip. It's not the most reliable gadget, but it's small, and if you aim the USB port to the ceiling, it will hold up the whole contraption. The picture is from it running in my bathroom. I've also got a YouTube video of it running it's very bright pattern below.

I'd probably not use this as a real nightlight, but as a quick light show at a party, I'm all over it. I also now have something to do with the rest of my v1.3 boards.

Here's one with a color box pattern that I wrote:

This was taken Sunday night over at Eric's place. The patterns you see going up/down from the LEDs are artifacts from the CCD sensor; you don't see them with your eyes. I think I'll do another video of the patterns bouncing off a wall to give a more ambient experience.

I got my first PC board back from Seeed Studios on Saturday; they arrived mid-week, but since they shipped from China, I had to go to the Post Office to retrieve them and sign the customs form. The box had a variety of parts including a big bag of tiny switches, and it had the five PC boards. I put my own board together that afternoon and tested it, but the real fun was earlier tonight when we got three more of the boards populated and flashing lights. Eric Moore got his waves test pattern running in a spiral configuration, and it looks really nice, especially bounced off a dark ceiling or wall.

There's more pictures at Flickr, and I should soon have the website at http://combee.net/rgbshield populated with part lists and assembly instructions. I've got a few tweaks to make for a version 1.2 of the shield based on our experiences putting these together, but nothing that should be too difficult to setup.