Arduino BlinkyBall Project • Tech Projects

I frequent a blog called hackaday.com which featured a project by “Nikolai”, it was a 10cm LED ball that used shift registers. It seems like a really fun project to attempt but the cost of having the boards made & not having any experience sending eagle drawings to fab shops initially kept me from starting. After some planning I decided to make my own boards by hand although because of that choice I would have to scale up the design dimension wise & reduce the number of “slices”.

I started off with rectangular 2200 hole PCB’s from RadioShack and using cutting dykes I made half circle boards with a cutout in the center to to fit the processing module, lipo battery & charger. Each slice is comprised of 2 – 8-bit shift registers, 16 LED’s & 16 resistors. There are 8 slices in total so there are 128 LED’s, I use and Arduino nano 3.1 from makershed.com along with a lipo batter & charger available at sparkfun.com. In order to fit these slices together to form a sphere I used circular PCB’s that I found at radioshack. I used a dremel to cut slits every 45-degrees for each of the slices to slide into, the package comes with 3 sizes & 2 of each, I used the middle size. I added a parallax mesmic 2125 accelerometer to the main board in the center to provide orientation to the sphere. You charge the LiPo batter through a USB mini port located in the center, charging takes 1 Hour approximately and lasts for 45 minutes.

I wanted to thank Nikolai for the inspiration & Null Space Labs HackerSpace for their take on the project. I also wrote Charlie over there to get his input on the spiral animation & he was very nice & helpful. I am going to post all of the code that I used in case anyone is interested. I wouldn’t say that I am the most proficient programmer & am still learning so be kind.

Links: www.hackaday.com/2011/10/16/we-want-this-led-ball/ //Original http://charliex2.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/the-blinky-ball-nullspacelabs/ //Null Space Labs In LA made a really cool version

Code:

int clockPin = 13; //IC Pin 11, Yellow Jumper
int dataPin = 11; //IC Pin 14, Blue Jumper
int latchPin = 8; //IC Pin 12, Green Jumper

const int xPin = 2; // X output of the accelerometer
const int yPin = 3; // Y output of the accelerometer

word patterns[176] = {
0b1100000000000000,
0b0110000000000000,
0b0011000000000000,
0b0001100000000000,
0b0000110000000000,
0b0000011000000000,
0b0000001100000000,
0b0000000110000000,
0b0000000011000000,
0b0000000001100000,
0b0000000000110000,
0b0000000000011000,
0b0000000000001100,
0b0000000000000110,
0b0000000000000011,
0b0000000000000001,

0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b1010111010001101,
0b0110101010011010,
0b0101010010011100,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,

0b1100000000000000,
0b0110000000000000,
0b0011000000000000,
0b0001100000000000,
0b0000110000000000,
0b0000011000000000,
0b0000001100000000,
0b0000000110000000,
0b0000000011000000,
0b0000000001100000,
0b0000000000110000,
0b0000000000011000,
0b0000000000001100,
0b0000000000000110,
0b0000000000000011,
0b0000000000000001,
0b0000000000000001,
0b0000000000000011,
0b0000000000000110,
0b0000000000001100,
0b0000000000011000,
0b0000000000110000,
0b0000000001100000,
0b0000000011000000,
0b0000000110000000,
0b0000001100000000,
0b0000011000000000,
0b0000110000000000,
0b0001100000000000,
0b0011000000000000,
0b0110000000000000,
0b1100000000000000,

0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b1010100100111110,
0b1010110100100101,
0b1010101001101111,
0b1100101111010101,
0b1111011010101010,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000,
0b0000000000000000

};

int index = 17;
int count = sizeof(patterns)/2;
unsigned int oldy = 0;

void setup()
{

// initialize serial communications:
Serial.begin(9600);
// initialize the pins connected to the accelerometer
// as inputs:
pinMode(xPin, INPUT);
pinMode(yPin, INPUT);

pinMode(latchPin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(clockPin, OUTPUT);
pinMode(dataPin, OUTPUT);

}

void loop()
{

accelorometer();

}

void accelorometer()
{

// variables to read the pulse widths:
int pulseX, pulseY;
// variables to contain the resulting accelerations
int accelerationX, accelerationY;

// read pulse from x- and y-axes:
pulseX = pulseIn(xPin,HIGH);
pulseY = pulseIn(yPin,HIGH);

// convert the pulse width into acceleration
// accelerationX and accelerationY are in milli-g’s:
// earth’s gravity is 1000 milli-g’s, or 1g.
accelerationX = ((pulseX / 10) – 500) * 8;
accelerationY = ((pulseY / 10) – 500) * 8;

// print the acceleration
Serial.print(“X: “);
Serial.print(accelerationX);
// print a tab character:
Serial.print(“\t”);
Serial.print(“Y: “);
Serial.print(accelerationY);
Serial.println();

if(accelerationY == oldy){
count = count + 1;
if(count >= 500){
for(int times = 0; times <= 160; times++){
idleTime();
}
count = count – 50;
}
}else{
count = count – 1;
if(count <= 0){
count = 0;
}
}

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply