What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).
In the previous status report, I assumed that the PCB would be at least delivered so we could at least check it out, but unfortunately that’s actually scheduled for next Tuesday. Thus, a lot of material items that I also wanted to do, such as assembling the PCB, trying out the LEDs…etc., were blocked. On the bright side, I was able to successfully set up my Arduino environment to connect with the Beetle (on-board LED blinking “Hello World” worked).
In the meantime, I’ve been working on compiling different projects’ uses of Neopixels (Adafruit has been particularly helpful). I don’t expect to be able to copy-paste code, of course, but being able to tweak existing code that I know is supposed to work should be easier to get working than writing from scratch. In addition, the multiple examples will help me understand the mandatory vs customizable components of the code. Here are the links I’ve been looking at:
- How To Control WS2812B Individually Addressable LEDs using Arduino goes over the anatomy of the LED strip, as well as has an example with connecting to Bluetooth to a web app to change the color of the lights.
- Overview | Gemma Color Touch Pendant Necklace | Adafruit Learning System necklace changes color based on touch (capacitive sensing); uses a calibration number in the code to adjust sensitivity, so perhaps we can try something similar when we are calibrating our mics
- Overview | Ursula’s Seashell Necklace | Adafruit Learning System a necklace that lights up by reacting to microphone signals. It also mentions calibration is necessary, but suggests manual hardware calibration rather than in the code (unfortunately we’re using a different mic that doesn’t have a screw to turn, but our equivalent is we can swap out different resistors to test out the gain). Finally, there are also some helpful debugging practices.
- Overview | Light-Up Costumes in Harsh Environments | Adafruit Learning System a mermaid costume, which is used underwater for cosplay. Of course, our system isn’t intended to be able to survive submersion, but it’s still helpful to know the kinds of design decisions made, such as minimizing wires at stress points, and how to connect wire ends securely.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
Because we thought we’d have our PCB in this week instead of next week, all of the PCB assembly and testing of components had to be pushed as well. Our goal is to rapidly assemble the PCBs (ideally within a day or two of receiving them, depending on our schedule availability) so we can get to the coding, since I suspect we’ll probably run into errors there.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Since the PCB is expected to be in by then, I hope to be able to assemble all the components in the PCB lab, read up on the FastLED library that a bunch of the above projects used, and try some of their simple example code to make sure the PCB passes before trying to upload more complex code.