A modular led light

[Petros]

8 months ago I had this little idea, I wanted to build a led puzzle for my girlfriend’s birthday. Like most ideas I have, it turned out much harder than I expected, and obviously went way over schedule and budget:)
After trying a couple of the cheap Chinese controllers I realized I needed something more customizable and was happy to find PB. I didn’t know jack s**t about coding, but why not add an extra difficulty to the project? It turned out to be the right move, the flexibility of the platform added an awful lot to the finished project.

The puzzle consists of wooden bricks with either 10 or 5 leds depending the size, plus cubes and angled connectors for 2D or 3D shapes, everything being held together with magnets that do a very satisfying “click” when connected:)

The electronics were a mindf**k, I wanted to use SK6812 so I could have pure white and not the lousy rgb mix found in other strips, so that meant 5v and an awful lot of amps, too many to pass through the only connectors I could find in the market small enough to fit on the PCBs. I ended up going for 24v, with 24v->5v converters in every brick that housed leds. After doing a few prototypes, an engineer did the final board design for me and had everything done at JLCPCB. Did I say everything? Not quite, I had to painstakingly solder those tiny 4 pin connectors you see in the photos myself, all 240 of them:(

The control box that you see in one of the photos houses PB, sensor board and output expander. I’m using 4 of the outputs, also added a pot for brightness and 4 buttons for hue selection or other stuff I might add in the future.

That’s it, a big thanks to @wizard , @Jeff and @Nick_W for their advice and help:)

[Scruffynerf]

This is very very very slick. So it’s a 24v power, 5v data line, 3 wires per strip?
Looks rotatable or not? Since blocks are single sided (only one side has lights), Adding a second side of lights (or more, up to 4 sides) could be done, I guess, by forking (all same color), or not (much more complex wiring, I think)… but the single side look is quite nice.

Some of my other questions seem answered by one or more photos, such as ‘are all of the pixels is a section wired up as a single pixel?’ (same data path to all, a fork to all pixels), clearly NOT, since you have colors changing within one segment…

‘is the turning (if any) done by a connector piece?’ I think it must be, given the PCB I see.

And I concur with @jeff, this is absolutely Hackaday worthy… you’ll have a lot of people interested in this.

[jeff]

THIS IS INSANE!! When you were asking about stuff like MagSafe I had no idea the final product would be like this. This is super cool. Congrats on all the tenacity to make it through the various challenges and power through this build.

Will you be making a video to show what you can do with it? Writing up your build anywhere like Hackaday?

[jeff]

Ooh one other idea - looks like your diffuser can be removed easily enough. Did you try using a thin veneer of the same kind of wood?

I make a logo sign based on this a few years ago, before Pixelblaze existed with an Electric Imp:

[zranger1]

@petros, just awesome! Both the electronice and the woodworking. I agree that the Hackaday folks would love this.

(@jeff, that veneer sign is also super cool. Is that the 0.2mm paper/fabric-backed stuff? It’d be fun to use that effect on an office wall!)

[jeff]

As far as I know, it’s just the product you get when you ask for a “veneer”. The depth isn’t specified on my 2013 P.O., but I do remember that it seemed to be a radial spiral product, because the knot pattern repeated. In our project, it was a “birds eye maple veneer”, but I don’t think there was a backing material like paper or fabric. That might have been a bad idea, because after several years of heat from LEDs, the Veneer->E6000->Acrylic sandwich layers tended to warp a little and produce a front face that wasn’t flat.

[Petros]

Correct, 3 wires per strip. I’m using 3 4-pin connectors to get a total of 2.5A(they are rated at 0.5A per pin). They can be connected on any of 4 sides, so they are not freely rotatable, only every 90 degrees with the screws of the male PCBs acting as guides.

I liked from the beginning the idea of having only one side lit, plus there is not enough room in the bricks for more sides. After testing a bit, I found that the ideal distance between the acrylic and the strip in order to get proper diffusion and not see the individual sources was about 1.5cm with a 3mm thick acrylic. Given the bricks are 3x3cm, not much space left!

Yes, all leds within a brick are individually addressable, but depending on the configuration there might be some forking. So for example the cube that you see in the photos has 120 pixels, but only 40 are addressable-I must say it took me a while to figure out how to wire the connecting cubes for this one.

The other day we did a couple of concentric 2D circles and used your map to great effect. Could you guide me on how to do one for the oval sphere in the photo below?

It’s got 25 pixels running downwards in the centre column, then 60 in every circle. I’m completely clueless as to how to map such an arrangement.

[Petros]

Trust me, when I was asking about the magnets I had no idea it would be like this either:)

I love what you did with the veneer, really cool looking and gives me ideas for the future:)

You all mention Hackaday, I hadn’t thought about that at all, I’ll give it a try.

In order to check how durable the whole thing was prior to giving it to my girlfriend, I gave it to my 4 and 5,5 year old children to play with-very scientific, I know:)- and they loved it. I’m now thinking of making a new version for them, same principles for the bricks but a new controller that will be a wooden board where they can place colored wooden chips and change patterns or pattern colors, it’s still a work in progress in my head but will post as I go.

[Scruffynerf]

Ok, so the key to mapping this oval shape (or any you could build) is to imagine it in 3D, pick a spot for reference (probably the top/start), and then use a set of values that make it easy to figure out the changes happening.

If you say the top of the shape is 0,0,0… Where the first value is the X (call it the blue axis), the second is the Y (call it the yellow axis), and the third value is Z (call it the red axis)

The first 25 pixels… Remain in the X = 0, Y = 0 range, but Z changes as it drops. Let’s say the values decrease as you move down, so the first led is 0,0,-1, then 0,0,-2, and so on. The bottom is 0,0,-25…

So now we’re at the bottom… We’ll move up the blue circle… Y will remain 0, while X (blue) will change as you move around it. Assuming it’s 6 segments of 10… The first 10, your X changes from 0 to 10… But the Z also increases back up, as it moves upward. If you did it exactly at whole values… It won’t quite line up, due to math… Half of 60 is 30, but you only have 25 vertical LEDs (levels) mapped, and the ones in the middle segment of the ovals are also vertical… so we want to fudge it on the diagonals. 25-10 (total vertical-oval vertical) is 15… Divided by 2 (2 diagonals) is 7.5 … So for your Z change, use 7.5/10 or .75 change So instead of 1,0,-24 then 2,0,-23, etc. Thru 10,0,-14… You actually need to 1,0,-24.25, then 2,0,-23.5, 3,0,-22.75, and so on…
Then the second segment, your X is constant (10, maybe 11, maybe 12? You can decide), your Y is still zero… And Z changes a full 1… Then third segment, X drops back down to 0 1 at a time, Y remains 0, Z continues to increase .75 each time…
That brings you to the top… Now X continues to reduce going negative… Y continues to be zero…
Z decreases as we drop again, by .75… Fifth segment, X is negative -11 (or -12, whatever value looks good), Y is zero, Z drops by -1… 6th segment: X increases back to 0, Y remains 0, Z drops by .75… Now at the bottom, you start the Y (yellow) loop, which is exactly the SAME as above, just reverse the Y and X changes, ie X is always zero.

You can do this in a spreadsheet, or by hand… or write code to calculate it. But no matter what, you’re doing the above to figure it out. You might tweak the values to increase the proportions, but that’s just scaling.

If that isn’t clear, let me know.

(Minor edit: fixed a few reversed Z increase/decreases (since Z goes from 0 to -25)
Technically it doesn’t matter if we do that or put 0 in the middle, except it’s more complicated to explain AND since PB will renormalize to 0…1, this way is so much easier.)

[wizard]

@Petros ,
This is seriously impressive, absolutely gorgeous build, and what a cool concept! This really is hackaday worthy.

Feel free to edit your top post and add details and/or links to the various forum posts, the journey from concept to result. All of the small and large challenges you had would all be really interesting for other tinkerers, and this would inspire folks for sure.

[gmcmicken]

Really impressive - as an idea and as a completed piece!

[Petros]

I will edit and add stuff, if you promise to add the ability to save variables other than sliders or pickers:) I’ve got these lovely buttons on the side of the controller box that are meant to be used primarily to change hue values on different patterns, but there is no way to actually retain these values, if I switch to another pattern and come back they are gone:((

A problem I’m facing at the moment, I’m trying to use the map editor, but I get repeated and scary crashes like the one below:

This happens when I delete all the contents within the brackets, am I doing something completely wrong? I don’t want to keep crashing it but would like to start putting in coordinates(as described by @Scruffynerf a couple of posts back) and have a visual reference while I’m doing it.

[wizard]

@Petros, looks like you are hitting a bug!
I would power it off and back on so that you don’t accidentally persist fail-safe settings.

To work around the bug, return at least one coordinate, like add [0,0,0] to the end of that array while you get things up and running. I’ll get that fixed in the next version!

[Petros]

Worked like a charm, thanks.

Is it possible to save maps under different names? If I get it right, when I press the save button the map will be saved on top of one of the defaults, correct?

[wizard]

Right, Pixelblaze doesn’t support multiple maps. This is perhaps the first 1000% reason for having multiple maps, most projects have a relatively fixed pixel position!

Your map code can have a setting variable and code that would let you switch between a number of alternatives, but switching would involve going to the mapper tab and changing that setting.

[Petros]

Made it, very simple to understand and implement-if a bit time consuming. I’m sure you could pull it off with a few lines of code but I’m happy that from now on I can do most maps in this manner.

Thanks!

[Scruffynerf]

Quite welcome. Yes, it’s a simple concept. Manual, spreadsheet, or code, whatever works. If you want to improve your mapping code skills, this is a good example of easy to code up.

[UnstoppableDrew]

That is super cool, nicely done!

[Petros]

Extremely easy to do, added a mode variable and if statements for the individual maps, whenever I need to switch maps it’s one keystroke away:)

For anyone wanting to do the same:

So if I accidentally press the “load example” button, my saved map is gone, correct? Would it be an idea to add a “custom map” in the list?

[wizard]

@Petros

So if I accidentally press the “load example” button, my saved map is gone, correct? Would it be an idea to add a “custom map” in the list?

As long as you don’t press “save” you can reload the page in your browser and it will pull the original code back.