Interactive Object (Update 2)
This is the second update for my interactive object, which is my gridded light board. After completing this round of work, I feel like a have a good chunk of the work done. I have all of my neopixels soldered (which took a super long time and a lot of learning), and I have a large chunk of the code finished. What needs to be done next is the finishing touches on the code, the enclosure, and some cool effects for the LEDs.
The picture on the left is my initial soldering set up (on a chair in my parents garage), which contains some hookup wire, wire cutters, duct tape, and wire strippers that didn't even work :). I struggled a lot with soldering that day, and I thought I was going to have to reimagine how I used my LED strip because I could not get the solder to stick to the LED.
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The second picture is my second soldering set up. I finally figured out the perfect temperature setting and found some steel wool to clean the tip of the iron. I figured out that I had to burn off some plastic layer on the LED strip so that the metal part could be fully exposed, and then solder could actually stick to it. I spent two days soldering, but I got the bulk of the work done in less than an hour once I got the hang of everything. I also inhaled a lot of fumes :/
These are my final soldered LED strips. Once I knew the connection was strong, I hot glued them. The next step was to start the code.
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The code was a little bit difficult to figure out in the beginning, but I generally have it all figured out at this point.
This is the draw function of my p5 code, which draws a row of colored squares that the user uses for reference. Then I set ranges of potentiometer values to a certain color, then wrote that back to arduino which would then light up with the corresponding color. Then once the correct color is chosen, then the next LED is selected. All LEDs start out white.
This is my arduino code. I think the only changes I need to make thus far is incrementing each row of LEDs. I think the p5 code would stay pretty much the same, other than if-statements that have to correspond to specific squares, but that's going to be copy and pasting, mostly.
On the left is the potentiometer and button for testing. One LED strip is connected at the far right. In the right picture is the actual LED strip. I coded everything so that every other light is lit up so that my board can be bigger than just a couple of inches. After this point, I just need to attach the other LED strips, make a simple enclosure and finish up the code.
I wish I had a little bit more of my code figured out at this point, but I don't think there's going to be too much to complete. My biggest concern is the enclosure, because I'm not sure how I'm going to get the button on top of my enclosure, because using a breadboard isn't going to be realistic.