Building a Hackaday “Vectorscope” Badge: DIY Guy Fawkes Edition

RE: Building a Hackaday “Vectorscope” Badge: DIY Guy Fawkes Edition

RobinJFMcBurnie — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 16:29:56 GMT

I love those round displays!

Ever since the AdaFruit "Halloween Eye" project I've also wondered about other uses for the round displays.

Depending on how far along you are with this project, I would suggest changing the Pico for a PicoW. As the BLE is now (mostly) useable, it opens up possibilities at conferences / Hacker Meets, etc. We have used similar to "broadcast" (over < 5 metres) our personal interests. This can interact with similar badges with BLE enabled. It also works with Mobile phones, although apps are a bit cludgy at present.

The idea is that the badge(s) direct their wearers towards the nearest person with interests in common. Done right, you can have the badge indicate with a sequence of concentric circles as you get closer. Sometimes you get a small group! Ideally you should have a button programmed such that when 2 people who are within the correct distance and have been for a (choose apropriately) specified time press their buttons at the same time, contact details are exchanged (which you can upload to your laptop at you leisure).

Also to save pins I would suggest NeoPixels (Needs to use one of the PIO Blocks) or the SPI (Needs One SPI Port - SCK and DO) version for the Led's. This takes either 1 (NeoPixels) or 2 (SPI) pins on the Pico. Likewise by using a resistor ladder (you might need two, one for each set of 8 Buttons. If you can get reliable resutls with a single 16 resistor ladder, then you only need one of the Pico ADC inputs to read which button is pressed. Of course this only likes one button to be pressed at any time.

Perhaps an I2S MEMS mic for input and one of those I2S Digital amps for audio out to the speaker?

As there are already libraries for almost all of the above, the software should not be too difficult to implement.

As an aside, this is battery-powered, is there really a need for a second battery backup for the RTC or just a SuperCap to keep the (Pico Internal) RTC going during battery replacement.

Thank-you for putting the KiCad files up on GitHub. They provide an excellent staring point.

A very Interesting project overall, I just like trying to reduce external components and make as much use of the power of the pico itself - I see that as part of the challenge!

RE: Building a Hackaday “Vectorscope” Badge: DIY Guy Fawkes Edition

fmilburn — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 22:37:41 GMT

Hi Shabaz, will the pcb have mounting holes? This is a board where a 3d printed enclosure could be nice.

RE: Building a Hackaday “Vectorscope” Badge: DIY Guy Fawkes Edition

DAB — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 20:23:50 GMT

Interesting build.

RE: Building a Hackaday “Vectorscope” Badge: DIY Guy Fawkes Edition

wolfgangfriedrich — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 02:23:10 GMT

Just for reference, one of the HackADay writers decided to recreate the original design in KiCAD. Here is the link to his article, which contains a reference to his github that contains a KiCAD project. I did not review the files, don't shoot the messenger.

https://hackaday.com/2023/11/13/vectorscope-kicad-redrawing-project/

RE: Building a Hackaday “Vectorscope” Badge: DIY Guy Fawkes Edition

fmilburn — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 16:56:33 GMT

I’m adding this to the list of things I would like to build :-). I have a friend who attended the conference and built an add-on for the badge.

RE: Building a Hackaday “Vectorscope” Badge: DIY Guy Fawkes Edition

wolfgangfriedrich — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 15:01:16 GMT

The round display also calls for applications that make use of a 6DOF sensor (accelerometer and magnetometer). The LSM303DLHC seems popular. It is I2C and would benefit from 2 additional IOs for the 2 interrupt signals. Could be an add-on board for J4.

One thing I find odd is the 680R current limiting resistors on the LEDs being grouped to 2-4-2 LEDs. It is the same on the original but I cannot think of a reason to do it this way. [emoticon:5ce50ea3f9eb49809e861e8733750338]

RE: Building a Hackaday “Vectorscope” Badge: DIY Guy Fawkes Edition

dougw — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 14:21:15 GMT

The RTC is a good idea since round displays always seem to have a clock demo, which can run when not using the module for experiments. Would you add a separate coin cell?