Progress!
Posted: January 23, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Electronic Lunch, festifools, Lanterns, UM, UMich, University of Michigan 1 Comment »Thanks for the productive session today!
Here are some links Roger sent me with details of some of the hardware we may be using.
Firstly it looks like we’ll be using Atmel chips. You can download their coding environment from here for free if you’d like to play around with it before we get stuck in.
The chips it looks like we’ll be using are these unless we can convince them to give us these for free!
There are also these microcontrollers with built in radio.
The LEDs we’ll most likely use.
And Roger recommends this as the best place to manufacture customised PCBs
So everybody should be coming up with ideas for the aesthetic of what we are doing. How will it look, how will the lanterns react, how will they work… ideas ideas ideas!
Nicole & I will put together some sort of bio/description of our project to put on the web and send to people interested in donating things/sponsoring/getting involved plus good old public exposure!
Roger is going to bring in the radio chips he already has and show us the very basics of how they are programmed.
The theme for this years festival is “Language: The Human Quintessence” (eh Brittan?!)
Their website also already has details of their lantern making workshops. We need to get in on it!!
conorowenbarry
lindaknox
mrachael
umcadop
I just read over the Developer Guide for Atmel’s Lightweight Mesh. I think this will be the simplest protocol stack to use. I’ll plan to go over that at the next meeting.
I’ve ordered an initial set of LED strips as well as some unmounted LEDs. The strips work out to about 19 cents per LED, which is more than the plain LEDs. The difference is that these run on 5 VDC directly, have a control chip built in, and can be easily cut to desired length. You just give it a serial data stream. No resistors or soldering (other than power, ground, and serial to one end of the strip)! Once we have the samples in-hand we can determine the number of LEDs required to light up a typical lantern. I can get them in about a week, so should not be a problem on timing for the event.