Chris Wood

Hi! I enjoy video games and programming, plus Azure and security, all of which you can find on my website.

2 minute read

Light Box is an electronics project that allows people to interact with a LED strip with some dials and a button to toggle programs, where they can change the colours that appear to the speed of sequences and even the LEDs that appear.

The two main goals of this project was to learn more about the electronics components and programming of the board, and to make something that people could interact and play around with (where the fun is in discovering and exploring what it can do).

Code

Checkout the code here!

Lessons learned

  • When soldering header pins to the Adafruit board, place the pins and board in a breadboard so the pins are vertically properly
  • The 26 AWG crimper wasn’t small enough for the headers/pins used, had to use pliers to finish off the crimping. Perhaps 28 AWG would work
  • When plugging in the board via USB, Windows might report it has a faulty device. It’s possible you have some pins around the wrong way (i.e. power/ground pins swapped for the led strip)
  • Before uploading code to the board, might need to push the reset button on the board first for it to upload successfully

How can I improve it further?

  • More leds and in a longer strip
  • Shorter cables electronic cables
  • Shorter dials/potentiometers (unless I can find some I can try cut them down)
  • Use spade connectors where possible instead of soldering (so can re-use components)

Setting up development environment

Took a bit of trial and error, but I was able to get this all working through VS Code and Arduino extension. The links below for setting up Arduino IDE might have helped, however VS Code is perfectly suitable tool once setup.

Main components

Helpful tutorials

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