A Busy House Day

I guess it’s getting closer to spring. We spent most of today moving furniture, cleaning, rearranging stuff, etc. The house has been really crowded since M moved in and between her stuff and my old furniture we were just tripping over everything.

So today was “get the stuff out we don’t use”. It was a carefully choreographed process of…

  • Friday get the storage unit ready to receive furniture.
  • Saturday morning move everything from the attic and second floor that’s leaving out to the front porch.
  • Go get the truck from Uhaul.
  • Get awesome neighbors to load up the truck, follow us to the storage place and Tetris the furniture into place.
  • Return the truck, tidy up, and fall into a death like sleep for 2 hours
  • Get up and go to a cohousing meeting
  • For evening entertainment, assemble the new kitchen table and chairs (smaller and better suited to the space).

Now we’re finally collapsing into bed after a damned busy day. But? It felt good. We worked hard, and made the house better without going crazy doing it.

Win.

Next? Tuesday we get a washer dryer. We’ve never had one in the house and while I lived by myself, it was ok taking things to the common house. But now that there’s three of us, we really need local equipment. Yay upgrades!

Video Demo of the Staff

Several people have asked how the project’s coming along, and I realized that the most recent video only showed a little bit of the functionality.  So I dusted off my iMovie skills and whipped up a little demo (complete with background music!  Aren’t you impressed?).  All the current modes are displayed, though the most recent one isn’t quite done yet.

Enjoy!

Magic Staff – Batteries, load, and runtime

Another few hours of work this weekend saw the Staff cut loose from it’s moorings for the first time.

Staff
Staff running on batteries only for the first time

One of the biggest challenges on this project is power.  The LED strips are 55 tricolor (very bright!) LEDs driven by WS2811 controllers.  The strips are powered at 5v.  Doing some quick load testing on the initial strip (and some online research) showed that each LED has a maximum draw of 60mA, so a 55 LED strip can draw a max of  3.3A @ 5v, and 6 strips can draw something like 20A @ 5v if the entire thing is at full brightness.  That’s a heck of a lot of current.   Compared to that, the Arduino wouldn’t be drawing dink.

I had to balance battery capacity with weight (this thing is meant to be carried in one hand after all).  I considered using D cells, but they’re just too heavy.  I ended up with 8 NiMH C batteries ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001AX1UQO/ ) from Tenergy.  These are ranked at 5000 mAh @ 1.5v.  I ganged them in groups of 4, connected in parallel.  This gave me 5Ah per group, or 10Ah total.  With a draw of 20A, at full power, it works out to only half an hour of uptime.  Now, there’s a lot of loss in this as well, so realistically, at full power (255,255,255 values on all the LEDs) I expect to get only about 15-20 minutes of use.

In general use, I don’t plan on using this in BLAZING WHITE MODE for more than a few seconds at any given time, but ongoing running will run the batteries down.  The other night I ran the staff using a ‘randomized’ pattern for a good 15 minutes on those batteries without any ill effects, and saw no problems (Check out the video here:  http://youtu.be/LNbIwpk5vdA )