Stacey's Canopy Bike
Sep. 13th, 2011 10:18 pmI never end up taking any pictures at BurningMan, even of stuff I make. I talked a lot about the bike stuff I was building but got no photos of it assembled and in operation. However, here's a picture of it when I was still in prototype mode:
The prow on the front was painted to match the purple and white of the bike and canopy and the fluoro orange tape went away once I finished making the fiberglass connectors for the rods.
I did this project very last minute and found out even more last minute that the port marked 'USB' on the board was in fact FTDI so I had to order another part and wait for that. Between that and writing ISR timer interrupts for PWM so it wouldn't burn up the triacs on the board, I ended up not having time to do the animation I'd planned to do. I burned all my time coding around the hardware limitations of the board. :P
Anyhow, last minute before we left for Burn, I grabbed a grayscale fractal image and threw it into my code as the inputs for the channels. That's the pattern that is displayed here: It's interesting enough that you know it's not random but definitely not what I had in mind but you can see the varying levels of brightness accomplished with pulse width modulation and you can see all channels lighting at once without the magic blue smoke escaping. So... It was good enough for prototype.
Now that I've got some more time, I can go back and do proper animation for it although on the whole I'm not completely happy with it. It wasn't bright enough and didn't really have enough channels. I think though that I can redesign their board and control many many more channels of EL Wire (In the range of many hundreds) and solve the ground and PWM issues. I am going to do a slightly easier project first to make sure I know what I'm doing and then come back and finish this one. I'll post schematics and stuff as they happen.
Anyhow... That's it. Not very exciting, is it?

I did this project very last minute and found out even more last minute that the port marked 'USB' on the board was in fact FTDI so I had to order another part and wait for that. Between that and writing ISR timer interrupts for PWM so it wouldn't burn up the triacs on the board, I ended up not having time to do the animation I'd planned to do. I burned all my time coding around the hardware limitations of the board. :P
Anyhow, last minute before we left for Burn, I grabbed a grayscale fractal image and threw it into my code as the inputs for the channels. That's the pattern that is displayed here: It's interesting enough that you know it's not random but definitely not what I had in mind but you can see the varying levels of brightness accomplished with pulse width modulation and you can see all channels lighting at once without the magic blue smoke escaping. So... It was good enough for prototype.
Now that I've got some more time, I can go back and do proper animation for it although on the whole I'm not completely happy with it. It wasn't bright enough and didn't really have enough channels. I think though that I can redesign their board and control many many more channels of EL Wire (In the range of many hundreds) and solve the ground and PWM issues. I am going to do a slightly easier project first to make sure I know what I'm doing and then come back and finish this one. I'll post schematics and stuff as they happen.
Anyhow... That's it. Not very exciting, is it?