saintsantos1527-blog

[saintsantos1527-blog]

Circuit Playground connected to USB

Learned something else new while checking the schematic for the Adafruit Circuit playground. There’s a diode in the circuit to prevent backfeeding of power from a different source. That means I can hook this device up to a computer while it is running off of a power source and not worry about frying my usb port. Arduino Unos however do not have this diode so connecting this to a source that would draw too much power would ruin your usb port. S boe careful when connecting things to your USB port and check the power distribution schematics first before you go plugging things in.

[saintsantos1527-blog]

A note on wireless DMX

I’ve been working on the interrupt code for one of the LED pieces for the Zodiaque LED costumes and learned something interesting about connecting an Arduino to a wireless DMX receiver on an interrupt. When I initially wrote the code I was looking into an implementation under the assumption that the device would be receiving the interrupt signal multiple times since a radio would blast a signal until the device triggers its response. So I thought it would wind up triggering multiple times. Turns out I was wrong. While testing the bump button for the wireless DMX I realized my code was receiving two signals: One when the device was receiving a high signal, and another when the device was receiving the low signal. The important part though was that it was only triggering once during each instance instead of multiple times. This made handling the interrupt so much simpler than my previous method. Changed around some error handling to prevent ghost triggers, tweaked animation forwarding, and we were ready to go. For those who are looking for something similar to this just remember, the wireless DMX creates only one trigger on signal for the device. 

[saintsantos1527-blog]

Platformio running

Finally got platformio running properly for the Adafruit Circuit Playground. The trick is that you build for the feather32u4 from the atmelvar library. It built perfectly, uploaded without an issue, and ran fine on the device. Now I could develop for the circuit playground using an environment I was used to instead of trying to force myself to use the Arduino IDE.

[saintsantos1527-blog]

Rehearsal

This video is the costumes in action. The codebases between myself and Alex were merged together in order to achieve a truly unique look. When the dancers are still the LEDs will blink a random LED white, and when the dancers are moving the costumes will react to sound that is playing through the stage monitors.

[saintsantos1527-blog]

Busted connection for Circuit Plaground

Hit a bit of a bad break today. One of our Circuit Playgrounds seemed to not want to connect to my PC anymore. Whether Linux or Windows my poor little guy refused to show up on wither of these machines. Initially we thought it was dead and simply replaced them with different ones and moved on. After class time was over I asked if I could bring one home and tweak with it a bit to revive the device. After hunting around online for a bit, I found this: https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-circuit-playground/help that had exactly what I needed. Ten minutes later I was away. Thank you Adafruit for having great documentation.

[saintsantos1527-blog]

Decisions decisions

Just a small gadget I have whipped up in the short term for Zodiaque LEDs. There were some differences in opinions for the colors for the costumes, so I threw this little gadget together so we could see the colors on the costume and make a more clear choice on the colors that we’re looking for. Plus when the arduino is connected to the PC it converts the analog signal from the potentiometers to a standard 0-255 signal so we can recreate the colors on the costumes. Now we can start zeroing in on what we want these costumes to look like. 

[saintsantos1527-blog]

Costume 1

The first prototype costume we have for this show is up and going. Now I can test how the code looks on an actual costume. All the colors for the LEDs in the costume are randomly assigned and stored in an array, so I can fade all the colors sequentially during the pulsing action. Now we are looking into adding animations to make the LEDs brighter or darker based on the movement of the dancers.

[saintsantos1527-blog]

Platformio

After working with this for a while I have slowly been learning. I don’t like writing code for this device using the arduino IDE. At all. It interrupts my workflow since I write most of my code in Atom, and I compile everything in the terminal. It is really distracting having it all contained within this clunky IDE for the arduinos and it made me feel trapped. So I went on the hunt for a better way to write the code for these costumes. Then I stumbled upon platformio. This was what I was looking for. It does change things up a bit in comparison to how the arduino IDE is handled. It simply integrated into my workflow much better. Plus it supports most boards that you can find. Most libraries you would need are also supported in their fantastic library management. Getting used to this is a bit wonky since there’s a slightly structure to the projects than one is used to. Instead of a .ino file being used this just uses a main folder with a main.cpp file that you write all of your code to. So much cleaner than the arduino method. There’s only one problem. It doesn’t support the Circuit Playground properly. Only the Circuit Playground Express. Of course it wouldn’t. Oh well. I guess I won’t be able to use this currently. Eventually though. Eventually.

[saintsantos1527-blog]

Differences in LEDs

So I learned something new about these Adafruit Circuit playgrounds. Apparently the way brightness is handled in the Circuit Playground is slightly different than it is in the standard neopixel. In the Circuit Playground I can simply call setbrightness() and it will cause no issues with the color of the pixel itself. However, when I swap over to official neopixels it turns out that the setbrightness() function is lossy so the pixels will essentially begin to “forget” what color they are. As long as I call the setbrightness(), then setPixelColor(), then show(). It seems fine, but some of the animations are really inconsistent. I will probably look into the official method of turning down the brightness of these LEDs to get the animation I want. That involves a set of arrays that stores a set of colors I am looking to get to, and a set of colors representing the state of the LEDs at that particular moment. Then decrementing the values while iterating across the strip. It’ll get the pixels to a brightness of zero on a pulse, and ass an additional feature, they change color as they fade as well, which is really cool. However, this will probably make other animations and effects difficult. The twinkle function works perfectly though. That one doesn’t care. It just works and that is awesome. Plus I get to use the rig that I had as my first prototype on this project. Beautiful isn’t it?

[saintsantos1527-blog]

A little teaser

Got some basic functionality out of them. Right now they’re all flashing the same color on each pulse. They have to be randomized. That’s an easy fix to make. In order to make the device detect that we it is currently moving I simply store the current accelerometer value in an instance variable for the next loop and grab a local variable that updates at every cycle. I then compare them and see what the difference is. If that is greater than a threshold I define then the device will register that it is moving. However, there is one flaw with this design. If the dancer is moving at a fairly constant rate, the device will register that as them not moving, since it is detecting acceleration in a direction, not velocity. So only changes in velocity will be registered. A little bit of physics to remember in case this blinks at a weird time. At the beginning of the video the LEDs are twinkling. This is the setting it defaults to when the accelerometer check does not detect any movement. Those need to be white, not colored. Another easy fix to make.

[saintsantos1527-blog]

Gotta go to Windows

So a little bit of information about where I was building everything and the issues I am currently being hit by. I am attempting to write code in arch linux using the arduino IDE. Besides my dislike of the arduino IDE I am quite happy writing code here since this is my usual environment. However, apparently linux doesn’t play well with these devices just yet. Either that or I setup the device wrong, which is a very high possibility as well. I’m having a lot of difficulty when trying to build for this device properly. Windows works just fine when building for it. So instead of spending hours trying to figure out why it won’t build I will simply switch to windows so I can get something done with these things.

[saintsantos1527-blog]

Starting out

Working with the circuit playground for Zodiaque Dance Company’s LED costumes. Nifty little gadget with a bunch of extra goodies thrown into it. I’m going to be working with the LEDs and the accelerometer. I needs to change its animation whenever a dancer is moving or not moving. For the time being though I am just trying to play around with the thing and see if I can get it working properly with the lights. Back into documentation digging. For the curious: https://learn.adafruit.com/introducing-circuit-playground