Building a Collaborative 900-pixel App-Controlled LED Light Show: Part 2 In Part 1 of this series, I introduced this project: I’m building a light show for my office in order to attract people to my office and to offer a creative, motivating outlet for people to learn to code. I spent most of the first post describing the calculations and components necessary to power 900 […]
Building a Collaborative 900-pixel App-Controlled LED Light Show: Part 1 I’m moving into a brand new office in a couple of weeks. I work at a university and mostly teach programming and web development. I was brainstorming about ways to make my office a place where I and others would really enjoy hanging out. I typically use my office almost exclusively as a place for […]
DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 6–First Test! Okay, so I haven’t had a chance to 3D print the base for the tube that will hold all the components together, but I couldn’t wait to preview what the finished bubble tube was going to look like. So without further ado, take a look at this video: I have to say, I am totally […]
DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 5–Motor Control I figured out how to control the speed of the air pump with the Photon. This will be just a short update on the programming part of this project. (Follow these links for: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.) What DIDN’T Work… Okay, so I fully admit that I’m a total newbie […]
DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 4–Tube Construction Okay, so now that I had acquired all of my materials for my bubbler, written the code to control it, and designed the base, it was time to construct the actual tube. This turned out to be the part that has been the most frustrating and required the most experimentation so far. Laser Cutting the End Cap […]
DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 3–Designing the Base So as you can imagine, a tube full of water that is four inches wide and six feet tall is not very stable. I needed a way to: Provide more stability to the bubble tube when it is standing upright House the NeoPixels and the air pump and all their tubing and wiring Make it […]
DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 2–Programming In this post, I’m going to describe the coding involved in creating my DIY bubble tube. In case you missed it, Part 1 of this tutorial describes this project in more detail and gives a provisional shopping list of parts you’d need to buy to do it yourself. I may amend the shopping list later, […]
DIY LED Bubble Tube: Part 1 Imagine the most annoying alarm you’ve ever heard clanging in your head all the time. Last week I had the good fortune to attend the 2016 Autism Conference hosted by the Matthew Reardon Center in Savannah, Georgia. It was there that I learned that many people with autism spectrum characteristics (ASC) experience continuous sensory overload. […]
