I moved in to my new room last night, and it struck me that the lighting
was dim and depressing. To remedy this, I decided to build an LED chandelier. As luck would have it, the fates conspired to make this possible. Today, there was a reuse post of two 3' diameter plexiglass hemispheres. After carrying them a mile back home, and almost causing two accidents because everyone was staring at me, I got to work. I decided to lock myself in my room and not come out until I had a working version of the chandelier.
The first thing to do was to decide how to light it. I decided to use 32
colorscape 7s that frostbyte had unloaded here a while back. I arranged the lights in four rows of eight units each. I then scrapped the color kinetics
control circuitry on the LED clusters and got to work on making my own.
Tep's newly aquired STK500 makes programming atmels a breeze, and I still had a bunch of atTiny26s left over from my last project, the layzor projector. I ran wires to the red, green, and blue LEDs on each cluster, so that each row has the same RGB values on each of its clusters, but the
four rows can operate independently. I then used the atmel to drive L293 H-bridge chips to control the red, green, and blue values for each row.
And now, some pictures!
The chandelier in my room. It's upside-down
The chandelier on.
The chandelier with another color
A (short) movie of the chandelier running a
simple program
I put the chandelier up in 42. All the wiring goes through the ceiling. The
new controller board can control the red, green, and blue levels on each of the
layers independently with 8 bit resolution. The board has an atmel on it
with basic PWM routines, and there is an RS-232 connection to my computer.
With a bit of work, I'll write an FFT program or winamp plugin and have a mini
light show in 42.
