So, I recently moved into my new apartment in Inman Square. I really like the place, but the lighting leaves a little to be desired. One saturday afternoon, I noticed a media lab group outcrufting tons of acrylic. I grabbed a bunch of square foot pieces, touched them up on the laser cutter with help from ingenious_dick, and then went home
I got home and started hot gluing the acrylic bits into a cube, not really knowing what I was going to do. I grabbed some colorscapes and coves lying around, ripped out the control electronics, and hot glued it into the box. After about 4 hours of work, I had a nice sturdy box complete with 15 RGB LED clusters and 4 GB color sticks. Everything was wired up nicely, so I turned it on.
BAM! It flooded the room with light. It sucks about 50W of power. I got started on a controller for it that would connect to my computer via usb, and give me full RGB control of each of the cube faces, as well as the coves at the bottom. The controller is similar to my chandelier controller, except with better software PWM. It's based around an Atmega48 processor, for anyone interested.Schematics are Here. Board layout is here
I finished the controller a couple days after the box. My first attempt was to actually etch the board in copper, but this was my first two-sided etch, and my sides were misaligned by a couple millimeters, so I junked it and just wired it into a protoboard. It has a wireless RF link to my computer, and I control it serially with programs I write. I'm using a sparkfun wireless module for the link, and it has pretty good range. I can hit the other side of my apartment easily, with no data loss, although I have to run it at 1200 baud to get reliable transmission. I'm only sending 3 byte packets (start byte, light address, light intensity), though, so that's plenty of speed. I'm working on a winamp plugin that will make it respond to music. I never knew windows serial port programming was so easy! I finally sat down and looked over some technical web pages, and was so pleased. For anyone who's interested, the packet format is as follows: I send the start byte, 222. There's actually a lot of noise in the wireless receiver, and by making the micro disregard any data that doesn't start with a 222 makes a world of difference in reliable data transmission. I then send the light address, in multiples of 22, normalized to 256. Finally, I send a byte for intensity. Full on is 22, full off is 2. Why all the 22s? Why, it is simply the number of cosmic significance.
Installing it was pretty simple. I wanted to mount it at a wierd angle in a corner, in a way that wouldn't interfere with the cube-ness, so I got some wall anchors and screws from my nice neighbor, drilled a few small holes in neo's corners, and fixed it to the screws using 22 gauge wire. I want to run the power wires through the wall, but I should probably figure out if I want to keep this apartment(I think so) before I go drilling through the walls. Here's a link to a short demo video.
