I thought I would take a short break from studying and teardown the party ball and laser. My apologies for my desk being a bit cluttered in the pictures.
I do have a short video of the lights working and roughly in place, but the video upload button is being very dodgy just now and not always showing up, i will try adding it in through editing once posted.
Party Light
Disassembly
The party ball has a battery pack for holding three AA batteries on the bottom with a small cable with a barrel jack attached.
Dismantling the ball is relatively simple, four screws hold the protective lens onto the body, with a rubber gasket between them, making this fairly reasonable to use outdoors. the spinning kaleidoscope, which create the light display, is held onto the motor shaft with a single screw. The circuit board and motor are attached to the body with two long metal stand offs, which whilst reattaching discovered are misaligned causing the kaleidoscope to rub up against the protective lens, this is solved by not fully tightening the two attaching screws. The assembly is easy enough to take apart, the only issue i have had is trying to remove the mounting arm, i think the screws are glued into the mounting holes, i think i will have to cut them off and make my own mounting arm for attaching it into the wall.
Something that surprised me was how small the internal components are, shown here next to the body
This was a welcome surprise as it give me plenty of room to put in my own circuitry, although i may attach an external antenna incase the motor effects the pcb antenna on the ESP8266 which i am planning on using to control it.
The Circuitry
The circuit inside is relatively simple. The motor is connected directly to the battery input, i first suspected this when trying to remove the kaleidoscope lens, turning the screw turned the motor shaft and the leds light up.
The leds are connected in series and appear to be 1W leds, they do produce a decent amount of light.
I had originally thought that the leds would also be connected directly to the battery pack, with a current limiting resistor, but it has a bit more complexity to it.
The chip in the middle is a FP6291 1MHz, 2.5A Step up current mode PWM converter and the circuit appear to be the typical application circuit defined in the data sheet, with a couple of the capacitors given equivalents.
I haven't taken the scope to the output to see the PWM output, but measuring the output on the multimeter shows 7v across all three LEDs.
My current idea for changing this is to replace the entire circuit board with a piece of acrylic cut to match, and to use a neopixel ring ( was considering a neopixel jewel but need a hole for the motor shaft). I am going to use neopixels as it allows me to either have the RGB configuration as already in the device, or to set all the leds to one colour. I may also just buy the neopixel breakouts instead of the ring as I cannot see me needing to use all the leds on the ring.
I am not sure what from factor of ESP8266 to use for this as using the neopixels i will only need to 2 IO pins, one for the motor and one for the neopixel data pin.
Party Lazer
I am not going to go into too much detail about the lazer as i discovered a youtuber bigclivedotcom who has already done a teardown of one of these lazers and who can describe it better than myself, here is the youtube link to the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bsb5X7fbUSw&t=1022s
The body of the laser is a two part aluminium case which is held together with the face and back plates.
The back plate of the device has all the controls for the mtor speed and selecting operation modes. The device can operate on normal mode where the patterns spin, tobe mode where they flash, with a variable delay, and music mode, which uses the microphone on the front to control when the lazer come on. The music mode is mostly useless as it only occurs on a high volume, and doesn't have a long range.
Inside the case there is two diode lasers and a combiner, which feeds the lasers into the motor and pattern disk.
I was originally thinking of just allaching a ESP8266 to turn on/off the power supply, but i am now thinking of replacing the whole controller to allow for more control from openhab controller.
Bar name ideas?
The last think i am thinking of to turn my flat into a bar (more like a nightclub) is a light up sign, but i need a name. If anyone has any fun suggestions i would love to hear them, or any other ideas for what it include in my smart home.
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