PIC Lantern The PIC Lantern project is to create a RGB LED that responds to certain sensors or can simply change colors. The project was different for me as I used pretty much all parts from Sparkfun. The following items were used.
Project Update/Announcement - 5/26/2011 Hello all, here is an update on the project. First, I finally got the xBee installed and it is working great. I also figured out an issue with the board resetting. Helps to check your configuration bits. So things have been coming along pretty well on the project. But I have a few announcements. First off, I am moving the project officially under my company, Open Engineering, LLC. OE is all about open source projects, so it is a perfect fit. Second, I plan to also put this project up on Kickstarter this weekend to raise funds to do a 50 board run. I feel good about both the hardware and firmware for this first run. I already have some plans for a version 2, but I would like to try and get a somewhat mass production run of this. That is another reason I am moving this under my company, its easier on the money side to keep everything there. As soon as the company project page and Kickstarter page is up, I'll be sure to put the links here. Official code will also be placed up over there (and yes, it will continue to be open source code and open source hardware). So I have been been working a lot on this project recently. As of right now, the project is pretty much in a solid prototype/beta software stage. My prototype board has been working great, the only thing I am now going to add is the Xbee module. I also need to start thinking about my power supply if I am going to run this off solar. But the essential stuff such as the temp sensor, processor and the BlinkM have been working with no problems. Software is now pretty good. I think I have most major bugs squashed and it is functioning as i was planning. I can issue commands and the lantern will set the color of the RGB based on the temp sensor. I may tweak my RGB table though, I think I may have too little data points and the transitions are a little too sharp. I only have 62 points which is probably the main reason. Otherwise I'm pretty happy how things turned out. I have a video of it in action below. Next steps
In the video you may wonder where the lantern "shade" came from. Solarbotics has a small lantern kit. They have two versions, one which includes their little LED circuit board and a version that does not. Of course I got the version without their circuit board. It's a little smaller than I was hoping, but it works pretty good, and the Tux and other geek logos on it are a nice touch. Not sure if I will go with this for the final version. It's basically cardboard that has been lasercut. So it's not very durable. But it works well for this testing and if I was planning on the lantern sitting inside, I would say it would be just fine. That's it for now, more to come later. When I clean up my code, I'll post it as well. |
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