Party Lights Project Glossary
This is the Party Pights project glossary. You will find an introduction to the project here, as well as a photo gallery and a link to the repository where you can download the source files. For specific details you can read the various blog posts if you wish. They too are linked below.
About
Once a year I go camping with my scouts group. We live in a cozy but dark tent that needed a festive lighting solution. I built a series of PCBs that sport RGB and white LEDs. The lamps are controlled by a (wired) remote control that dictates the light effects. The project involved custom made circuit boards with microcontrollers, switch mode power supplies and some analog electronics. To keep the electronics safe from the outside world I made enclosures out of partly up-cycled materials and 3D printed parts.
Gallery
Repository
My work is available at my Gitlab repository. The hardware designs are published under the CERN-OHL-S license. The code is GPL licensed.
Blog
Introduction
This first article outlines the aim and the general plan for the project. What it will be made of and how it’s inteded to work.
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LED Board Design
Each lamp module sports its own small circuit board that decodes the serial data and controls RGB and white LEDs. This post outline the design of these boards.
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LED Boards Build and Test
After the design phase of the LED boards followed soldering. An awfull lot of soldering. And then testing and trouble shooting. This post tells the story of tedious soldering, a lot of testing and then some more soldering. Read more…
Receiver Firmware
Microcontrollers don’t do a lot without firmware. This post outlines the (DMX512-inspired) protocol that controls the LEDs and the implementation in firmware.
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Lamp Enclosure
The lamps are built into up-cycled glass jar but that’s only part of the enclosure. A fair amount of 3D design yielded a multi-part enclosure that snaps in place to hold the LED boards. All the parts are designed for 3D-printing. This post describes that design.
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Controller Board Design
The LED boards don’t do anything if they aren’t told what to do. This post details the design of the controller board and user interface. It involves an STM32 microcontroller, several power supplies and even a microphone pre-amp.
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Controller Board Build and Test
The post describes the build proces and the testing of the controller board. The good, the bad, the ugly, it’s all there.
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Controller Enclosure
Like the LED boards, the controller board also wanted nice and comfy home to live, so the 3D-printer got to work again to print an enclosure. Complete with buttons and makeshift light pipes.
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Demo Firmware
Panic struck mere days from the deadline and multiple things went wrong at the same time. My dream of fancy flashing lights almost fell to peaces, but many hours of troubleshooting, relentless coding and fair amount of epoxy resin saved the day in the end.
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Hardware Wrap-up
Yes, that read ‘Hardware’. Not Project. That’s because technically the project isn’t finished until it runs proper firmware. That may take a while to happen however, but there is enough to discuss about the hardware until then. So this post discusses how the hardware design went and what could be done differently in future.
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