Introducing Solas and the journey of creating my own RGB LED Board

RE: Introducing Solas and the journey of creating my own RGB LED Board

robogary — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 16:56:09 GMT

keep up the creative momentum, looks great

RE: Introducing Solas and the journey of creating my own RGB LED Board

beacon_dave — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 14:19:07 GMT

"...We decided to make a single RGB LED petal that would attach to Solas over Jacdac and be codeable, chainable. It's Solas without the PCB..."

Is the Solas Petal more-or-less a 'prototype' Solas and still using a RP2040 as the brains ? or is it an off-the-shelf JM Single RGB LED module stuck onto a Solas PCB template ? Not quite clear if the upstream Solas it is attached to is being coded or the Solas Petal itself.

Looks like some of the Microsoft reference designs are using the STM32 for basic IO onto Jacdac for the time being, with a few alternative devices for their 'JM Brain' reference modules.

Is there an intention to use the tree branches as 'Dedicated hubs' at all or will it be a case of daisy chaining each petal back along each branch testing your 'graph theory' maths skills (soon to become known as 'the travelling petal problem').

I was thinking that the branches would be quite well suited to the filament LED strips which tend to come in predefined lengths as you could adjust the sizes to suit. You could perhaps also have some 'active branches' acting as 'Hub devices' providing both IO and bus routing.

RE: Introducing Solas and the journey of creating my own RGB LED Board

beacon_dave — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 14:19:29 GMT

Another great looking project there.

( I spotted Cubert over on your Futurelearn Physical Computing MOOC last week. )

I recently saw this modular tree light project over on Instructables and thought that it could be taken to the next level with interactive RGBW LEDs.

https://www.instructables.com/Modular-Tree-Lamp-3D-Printed-or-Lasercut-/

Looks like you are well on your way to doing just this. [emoticon:c4563cd7d5574777a71c318021cbbcc8]

( The stop motion video is quite effective as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxs7BSr5vLc )

Are you planning anything to make it easier to map the position of the lights in 3D space ? With a rigid structure I guess that it should be easier to calculate with some help from a phone camera.

I guess there are lots of other possibilities for the base / trunk of the tree such as a cylinder RGB matrix allowing messages and animations.

RE: Introducing Solas and the journey of creating my own RGB LED Board

michaelkellett — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 11:49:14 GMT

How very irksome - I left a quite long comment and the website just dumped it !

I'll try again.

Just got a message from E14 (automatic) - it seems that quoting the email address copied from the web page cited below causes it freak out - how silly.

I asked if this project was sponsored or supported by Microsoft.

I ask because my attempts to find out more about Jacdac have not met with any success.

The most promising link is a glossy page wit the heading

Partner Preview

Jacdac is currently in preview. If you would like to join as a pre-release test partner, please email jacdac-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I had got the impression that it's an open source project and I'm looking for basic technical information about how the protocol works. So far all I have managed to find out is that it's a half duplex UART protocol - I'm looking for stuff about timings, packet construcion etc.

If you can point to any links that provide such info that would be nice.

RE: Introducing Solas and the journey of creating my own RGB LED Board

michaelkellett — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 11:40:00 GMT

Tried to leave a comment but it was deleted when I clicked "comment" button.

RE: Introducing Solas and the journey of creating my own RGB LED Board

michaelkellett — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 11:37:01 GMT

Is this project sponsored or otherwise supported by Microsoft ?

I looked (quite hard) and can find no publicly accesible open source access to Jacdac - but lots of references to its being "under preview" and requiring some kind of sign up:

eg:

Partner Preview

Jacdac is currently in preview. If you would like to join as a pre-release test partner, please email jacdac-tap@microsoft.com.

(from https://microsoft.github.io/jacdac-docs/)

Most of the earlier researchy type things I found countain broken links to anyhwere where detail might be found.

So far, all I can determine is that Jacdac is a simplex UART protocol (using same wire for send and recieve) and very little more, except that it seems to embody a very Microsoft centric approach to code generation.

Can you enlighten us as to the actual status of Jacdac and where basic techincal documentaion might be found (ie the kind of thing that talks about signal levels and timing and checksums etc etc.)

Thanks.