Dazzling Disko Dance!

Well it looks like project 2 has come and gone. I really wish i was better at keeping up with this blog-O-sphere thing better, but an overview of the process is better the nothing I suppose. I did manage to take a bit bette documentation for this project and even have final images!

The basic idea behind my work was to explore the potential with LEDs, what I can do and how I can work with them. I chose an eight by eight matrix for the base of my light show because I had the chip to controll such a matrix and I also wantedto expand on this idea that I had worked on a bit previously.

I will start by showing you the finished product:


The matrix is situated in 7 rows of 8 with the final row of 8 located on the bottom of the container. My first version of this matrix was very plane and situated in a square 8x8 layout. I am much happier with this second outcome because the vessel that this display is shown in allows for a more interesting show.




Above you can see the original tube that I purchased for the low low price of $5 at Bring. I then cut it down to just around a foot long and created a grid pattern based on it's circumference to mark out the ares to drill for my LEDs.

I then went about wiring the matrix up, where I would have to connect all the anodes in a line together and then all the cathodes crossing in the other direction to make the matrix. As seen below I used the container to set up the wiring on the outside then i flipped it inside out and put the LEDs through the inside. Then I painted the outside white to give it a bit more neutral color and a start off place if I decided that a certain color scheme was better for the location that this piece settle down in.




Next we can see the finished LED matrix with the bottom cap attached in the background. After that we have two images of setting up the wiring into the container and then with my arduino.





The beauty of this light show is that I can program the lights to do just about what ever i want them to do. There is plenty of customization possible and I plan to keep tweaking this thing in the days to come. If I could change some aspects of this I would have used RGB LEDs, and included a mic with a band pass filter screening for lows and highs and change the speed based off of this. I had a lot of fun with this over all and am very happy with tis new version of the light show. I plan on continuing interesting ways to recreate this idea.

***On an extra note, if there was a tool that I could say was my wing man for the use of LEDs; that tool would be a wire wrap tool. If you have never used a wire wrap tool before and you do a bunch of wiring, soldering and the like for prototypes and other quick little projects that you may not actually need to solder, I would highly recommend you get one of these. A quick break down n how they work is you have the tool that looks like a small jewelers screw driver. You load it with this really thing wire that is the wire wrap material. Then you insert the leg of a LED, for instance, twist clockwise till all the wire you need is around the leg of the LED and BLAM! you have a tightly warped wire around your led in well under half the time it would take to even do a quick solder! This may not bee the best connection so for some more permanent jobs that you want yo last you should still use solder, but this tool saved me over 3 hours of wiring time!