Music Mullet Blog 2 - So It Begins

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Music Mullet Blog 2 - So It Begins

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So I got Adafruit things in the mail

• 1 Gemma
• 1 Lipo battery charger
• 1 500 mAh Hour Lipo battery
• Lots of crocodile clips
• 1 Photo cell
• 25m of Conductive thread (metric system Ftw)
• A small wire piezo
• 1 fast vibration switch
• 4 Neopixels
• 1 tactile on/off switch
• And 1 Usb cable

I wanted to check to make sure that everything works. A kind of Adafruit Hello World if you will.

I’ve never worked with neopixels before so I it was really important to test them to see how bright they were so I could figure out how many I would need if I want to use it as a photo light.

I plugged the charged battery into the battery connector, attached crocodile clips from the Vout pin of the gemma to the plus pin on the neopixel. I attached crocodile clips to the gemma and neopixel ground. Last, I attached crocodile clips between D1 and the input pin of the neopixel. It’s the one with the little arrow pointing in the direction of the next neopixel.

I struggled for a while to get the Gemma to work on my laptop. I have a windows 8 laptop and kept running in to the following error when I tried to upload even when in bootloader mode

avrdude: Error: Could not find USBtiny device (0x1781/0xc9f)

Turned out my timing was just off. I had to wait for the Gemma to reconnect which took about 8 seconds out of the 10 seconds that the red LED blinks and then quickly upload the sketch before the Gemma exits the bootloader. I checked online and it seems quite a few people having been having this problem and it seems to be the fault of windows 8.

I loaded up the strandtest code.

#include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>


#define PIN 1


// Parameter 1 = number of pixels in strip
// Parameter 2 = pin number (most are valid)
// Parameter 3 = pixel type flags, add together as needed:
//   NEO_KHZ800  800 KHz bitstream (most NeoPixel products w/WS2812 LEDs)
//   NEO_KHZ400  400 KHz (classic 'v1' (not v2) FLORA pixels, WS2811 drivers)
//   NEO_GRB     Pixels are wired for GRB bitstream (most NeoPixel products)
//   NEO_RGB     Pixels are wired for RGB bitstream (v1 FLORA pixels, not v2)
Adafruit_NeoPixel strip = Adafruit_NeoPixel(4, PIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);


void setup() {
  strip.begin();
  strip.show(); // Initialize all pixels to 'off'
}


void loop() {
  // Some example procedures showing how to display to the pixels:
  colorWipe(strip.Color(255, 0, 0), 50); // Red
  colorWipe(strip.Color(0, 255, 0), 50); // Green
  colorWipe(strip.Color(0, 0, 255), 50); // Blue
  rainbow(20);
  rainbowCycle(20);
}


// Fill the dots one after the other with a color
void colorWipe(uint32_t c, uint8_t wait) {
  for(uint16_t i=0; i<strip.numPixels(); i++) {
      strip.setPixelColor(i, c);
      strip.show();
      delay(wait);
  }
}


void rainbow(uint8_t wait) {
  uint16_t i, j;


  for(j=0; j<256; j++) {
    for(i=0; i<strip.numPixels(); i++) {
      strip.setPixelColor(i, Wheel((i+j) & 255));
    }
    strip.show();
    delay(wait);
  }
}


// Slightly different, this makes the rainbow equally distributed throughout
void rainbowCycle(uint8_t wait) {
  uint16_t i, j;


  for(j=0; j<256*5; j++) { // 5 cycles of all colors on wheel
    for(i=0; i< strip.numPixels(); i++) {
      strip.setPixelColor(i, Wheel(((i * 256 / strip.numPixels()) + j) & 255));
    }
    strip.show();
    delay(wait);
  }
}


// Input a value 0 to 255 to get a color value.
// The colours are a transition r - g - b - back to r.
uint32_t Wheel(byte WheelPos) {
  if(WheelPos < 85) {
   return strip.Color(WheelPos * 3, 255 - WheelPos * 3, 0);
  } else if(WheelPos < 170) {
   WheelPos -= 85;
   return strip.Color(255 - WheelPos * 3, 0, WheelPos * 3);
  } else {
   WheelPos -= 170;
   return strip.Color(0, WheelPos * 3, 255 - WheelPos * 3);
  }
}

I prayed to google, and it worked!

I connected all 4 neopixels and tried to see if I could take any photos with them. I ended up chasing my cat around who was not at all interested in the bright lights.

The light really gives off a cool effect though. The different colours are all focused on different points and give an effect like you see on photos of galaxies and nebulas.

I LOVE GALAXIES AND NEBULAS

Just out of interest, I taped a bunch of old LPD6803 LEDS to my camera bag when I photographed an event over the weekend and this is what the light they gave off looked like. I want my hat to do this but be able to choose from different colour patterns when the user chooses