Here is an update of my light control circuitry. I have an Arduino mini at the bottom right acting as my primary controller. I’m not using the arduino environment to program it though. I’m just using it because it’s a nice small atmega platform that has the crystal already on the board. I’m just coding in straight C and using avrdude to load the chip (which really isn’t all that different). I have it currently wired to three other amega48 microcontrollers which are programmed to act as slaves on an TWI serial line. I then have two of those wired up to MAX232 chips to stream the serial data that the slaves receive to my desktop computer so that I can verify that they are receiving the correct commands. I can’t claim that I entirely know what I’m doing… but I sure am having fun!

Ok…. This was a big deal for me. For some reason it took me a while to get a TWI (I2c) interface up and running properly and it held me up from doing some blog posts. But it’s working now! Here I have two simple avr platforms up and running. The one on the left is the master and the one on the right is the slave. To control 300-500 LED lights I decided that it was a job for more then one microcontroller. So I will have a master LED controller and several slave LED controllers. The master will push the animation frames down the bus and each of the slave controllers will control a bank of shift registers connected to 64 LEDS.

I added a a serial output to my development board to help with debugging the chip. The tutorials at sparkfun were really helpful!

Here I have a sort of custom arduino that I built. At least I used the schematics for an arduino to get a nice simple avr platform up and running. I am just coding in straight C though using avr-libc though as opposed to using any of the arduino libraries or utilities. Here you can see the stk500 development board next to my board. I am using it along with avr-dude to program my board.

Wow… the frame of my first bot I think is coming together. I still have to finish up the roof, create the front and smoke stack. But so far, I’m pretty happy with it.

Here is my start on the first bot! The start of my very first wire sculpture. Hope I don’t screw it up!

This is a prototype copper grid for me to test sculpting with copper and to act as a test bed for 30 leds. Also here is a prototype of a led assembly for the project. I’m going to have to make a couple thousand of these. Oh Boy!

More parts for Project E and more clues as to what I am building! I have a Daisy MP3 player kit from Make, 2 20 watt amplifier kits from Ramsey (although I think I might upgrade to the 40 watt kit), 2 different types of fm receiver chips (I have no idea which one I am going to use yet), and finally a gi-normous amount of copper wire (little clue, I’m probably going to need a lot more).

I just put together a small circuit that allows me to control an array of led lights with a shift register chip. I found out how to do that in this tutorial. It’s working out awesome. My next step is to expand it to 16 led lights, and then create a test animation with Light Animator and load it on the arduino.

I have decide to use the arduino board to power project E. In fact I think I may end up using 9 arduino boards in Project-E. I estimate that Project-E in total will have 13 microcontrollers. Here you can see I have a very simple circuit that I did based on this tutorial. It’s from the Make weekend podcast. These guys are awsome; however, Bre is no longer doing them so we’ll have to see what Make does in the future.

I wrote a piece of software called Light Animator. I designed it to help me animate the hundreds of led lights that are going to be part of Project E. It should be capable of animating hundreds or even thousands of lights on a time line. I’m going to release it in the next couple weeks under the GPL so anyone can download it and extend it. It is extremely limited at what it can do currently, but over the course of the next few months as I complete Project-E, I will be enhancing it with all sorts of features. This Christmas I even plan to use the same software to animate my Christmas lights!

And finally you see here my wonderful new electronics workbench. For a quick weekend project done on a whim I think it turned out really well and did not cost me more then about $70 on plastic bins. Now maybe I can get some real work done!

Ok… Project E has an amazing amount of part requirements! I was in serious need of some more room on my electronics workbench for working on project E. Boxes and boxes of parts have been coming in and my work area was getting extremely unmanageable. Since I did not have any walls behind my workbench to fasten any organizers to, I decided to do what any sane person would do and build a wall and bolt it to the workbench.

Here I am working on one of the prototype robot bases for Project E. I’m not finished yet… I still have to put the controller board on the robot base to control the servos below that drive the wheels. This robot is based on a tutorial here. This is just the R&D phase so I’m not sure if this is the robot platform I’m going to go with. I need 4 robot bases for Project E. I’m not sure if this protype is going to have a enough power.

Project E is a bit of a complicated project and so will require some significant R & D work. This is my electronics work area right now…. It’s absolutely in chaos, but I don’t have a lot of time so it will have to do and I clean it up as I move forward.