Our RGB color mixer has been through many stages and changes. I love our idea because it takes a very simple digital concept, and brings it into the physical world as an elegant creation. On the downside, because we had gone through so many changes, we ended up running short on time.
Idea 1: Grass space
Our very first idea was to move clear plastic tubing with servo motors like so:
The idea was to have tubes lit with LEDs mounted on the ceiling that would gravitate towards an individual that walked below it.
We immediately ran into several problems.
1. We couldn’t control the bending direction of the noodles. They tended to bend in the direction the tube had been coiled.
2. Servo controls would have been extremely noisy, not to mention complicated.
2a. Not to mention we wanted a graduated bending of the noodles.
3. We turned to electromagnets, but Liesje surfaced a whole area of problems with magnets sticking to each other.
Because of the multitudes of problems, we decided to drop the idea.
We brainstormed for the next few weeks. We realized we spent way too long brainstorming.
But we ran through these iterations.
We had hit upon one idea that we really liked– an RGB color mixer.
We just had to figure out the interaction portion.
Eventually we settled on the idea of a simple cube with 3 sensors to control the output.
We carefully decided what materials to use before purchasing, but we decided on a frosty acrylic cube with 3 HotPot linear potentiometers in a box of R, G, B, and White LEDs rather than a single RGB led. We decided on white because we found that mixing RGB manually for White is actually technically difficult, so we had wanted to fake it with white LEDs.
From here on out we ran into a new set of problems to overcome.
1. Wiring and Organizing the LEDs
Bad planning here. Eventually we color coded the wires and rearranged the LED pattern more efficiently.
2. How to wire and power 100 LEDs in parallel.
The wiring was complicated, but we came to this conclusion. The powering was more tricky, it required math and some trial and error. We used the bench power supply to figure out how many amps we would need, and subsequently what power adapter to buy. We used some basic math to figure out what resistors we would need.
3. And making the box
We haven’t completed the box just yet, but we have the panels. Unfortunately we stupidly glued the pieces together incorrectly, so that put our entire construction on hold. We also decided to have the LEDs sit on a grid on a side of a reflective acrylic sheet rather than maxing a cluster or box of LEDs.
Oddly enough, code was not a problem.
int ledPin1 = 11; // select the pin for the LED
int potPin2 = 1;
int ledPin2 = 10;
int potPin3 = 2;
int ledPin3 = 9;
int val1 = 0; // variable to store the value coming from the sensor
int val2 = 0;
int val3 = 0;
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
pinMode(ledPin1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPin2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPin3, OUTPUT);
}
void loop() {
val1 = analogRead(potPin1); // read the value from the sensor,
between 0 - 1024
val2 = analogRead(potPin2); // read the value from the sensor,
between 0 - 1024
val3 = analogRead(potPin3); // read the value from the sensor,
between 0 - 1024
analogWrite(ledPin1, val1/4); // analogWrite can be between 0-255
analogWrite(ledPin2, val2/4);
analogWrite(ledPin3, val3/4);
Serial.print("R: ");
Serial.print(val1/4); // print the pot value back to the
debugger pane (devided by 4 to make sense to us)
Serial.print(" ");
Serial.print("G: ");
Serial.print(val2/4); // print the pot value back to the
debugger pane (devided by 4 to make sense to us)
Serial.print(" ");
Serial.print("B: ");
Serial.println(val3/4); // print the pot value back to the
debugger pane (devided by 4 to make sense to us)
delay(200);
}
At this point in the code we still hadn’t yet decided how to code the White LEDs.
All in all, though the project has yet to be completed, I’m glad we took our time to decide on something we all liked. It was an incredibly fun process despite the fact that I had CommLab and my applications presentation at the same time. It still feels like my semester ended with a bang.
Next steps:
1. Make the box
2. wire up the 100 LED sheet
3. attach the pots
4. upload the code and we should be good to go. (and maybe some more photos)
