A man out of society. Lost in his own world.
A project to build a portable hand held ‘magic staff’. Self powered, controllable by hand, and shiny!
A couple people have asked me to post the code I use in the Staff. I’ve uploaded it to Github, and I’ll try and keep copies active there.
I’ll give you a fair warning, the code ain’t pretty 🙂 It works wonderfully, but it was “Hack it until it works, doesn’t crash, and does what I want, beyond that, we’re done!”
This past weekend I packed up and headed to Arisia to work, play, socialize, and, finally put all the costume elements together and become… THE TECHNOMANCER.
This was the final unveiling of the entire costume the magic staff was created to drive. I’d been adding parts and components for weeks, waiting for others to come in, etc – and in the last week, it all came together.
In summary? It went GREAT. Lots and lots of awesome feedback, oohs and ahs, and tons of geeky conversation around the staff and other parts of the costume. I did learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t work when doing a costume this involved, and while I’m nowhere near done, I’m at a point where I can pick up all the pieces and go to an event, and I’m pretty sure it’ll work well.
Here’s a rundown of everything I added to make the full image work:
All assembled, it felt comfortable, looked great, and I was ready to go out in public.
A couple things became apparent really fast…
I wore the costume and staff for a few hours on Saturday night, and had lots of people taking pictures. The pic above is from the hotel room before I went out (when I was out in public, the hood was actually pulled forward much more) – but you get the idea. The EL wire is barely visible 🙁
I have tons and tons and TONS of ideas moving forward, all workable within this costume design (vast improvements on the staff, some small changes to the robes and mask), but for a first time out, I’m pretty psyched!
For the Staff project, I’m going to be replacing the existing Arduino Uno R3 with a smaller, more easily embedded Arduino Nano. The Nano is a heck of a lot smaller than the Uno (makes sense – it’s meant to be permanently installed, while the Uno is a prototyping platform). I received my Nano a few weeks ago, but immediately ran into a frustrating problem… code would compile, begin to upload, and I’d get the error “stk500_recv(): programmer not responding”
The intarwebz are full of people reporting this problem, unfortunately most are not finding answers.
I went through the usual debugging problems – changing out the USB cable I was using, checking to make sure USB drivers were correct – I could still upload and use code on my Uno, but the Nano flat out refused to accept the new code (and I did check the very common problem of not selecting the correct board in the IDE).
Finally, came across a general discussion about bootloaders, and there was a comment that sometimes these boards do not reset properly. After some more research, I found some folks using various ‘reset button’ hacks to sort of nudge the board into accepting code. With a lot of trial an error, I have a procedure that seems to work pretty consistently. There’s occasional twitches, but with persistence it always loads.
Continue reading “Arduino Nano “Programmer Not Responding” on a Mac”
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!
I’m looking to replace the Arduino Uno in the staff with a smaller controller that will fit in the body of the internal tube. The Mini 05 seemed like the best option… well, received it this weekend, and I have to admit, I’m a little daunted.
On the one hand, it sure will fit in the staff, on the other hand, there’s a lot of very small contact points here. My soldering is pretty crude. I’ll have to put in a header for the USB port first, after that I can probably use a socket, which’ll make connections a lot easier.
Well I’m back home after taking the staff out for Halloween. I carried around as part of my costume, costume – greeting people coming to the community for trick or treating, but also to hang out with my neighbors. A lot of people were asking about the staff – both seeing it in action and having heard about me working on it for the last 2-3 months.
Now, I’m back home, the staff is sitting in the corner, still running. I’m using this as a battery test. It’s running the ‘sparkle’ pattern, which everyone agrees is the prettiest (see the video from my previous post). It’s been on, showing patterns and lights now for about 5 hours, easily surpassing what I expected from the 8 C NiMH cells.
People on Hackaday and people I meet in person ask a lot of questions, so I decided to write up an FAQ….
Lets start with the first one… “Why did you build this? Where’d you get the idea?”
It all started with a book…
The day finally arrived! After a marathon work session on Saturday, I was able to take the staff to a party last night! The batteries held up great, the staff was a great hit, and everyone was asking about it and wanting to see what it did. Talk about inspiring!
There were naturally some ups and downs, with some wins and some losses:
uint32_t on = strip1.Color(random(64),random(64),random(64));
I’ll try and fix the battery tray problem by Halloween, but I think we’re in pretty good shape!
ETA Here’s a video of the staff in action.
Another few hours of work this weekend saw the Staff cut loose from it’s moorings 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 )
Well, the magic staff project has reached a pretty awesome milestone.
Last night was the first time I had the entire assembly operating off-computer. The Arduino Uno had been running directly via USB cable from my mac. That provided power and an easy way to upload code. With my new bench power supply, I had enough amps in the bench supply to power the LEDs and the Uno. A few alligator clips later, and voila, the staff had 3 led strips lit, and the Uno was running it’s program just fine.
I also detached and remounted the 2 strips that were mounted backwards (yes, these strips are directional. See the arrow? Yeah, missed that on the first run – Of the 6 LED strips, 2 were backwards. Oh well). Peeling them off wasn’t that hard – hot glue doesn’t hold up to lateral forces, and it came away easily.
These strips come with one end of the cable pre-wired with power and data, so I only had to manually solder the parts that were ‘cut’ in the middle of the strand. That was only 3 connections, so it wasn’t so bad. But I’ll admit, not having to do all six was a relief.
So. Things are reassembled now, all the ground and +5V lines are attached (and ganged together), and data lines are wired to all the strips. I need to come up with a strain relief mechanism to avoid yanking the leads off the strips, and then work on how to install the controller, power leads, and hookups into the head of the staff.
Oh, I also ordered the 8 C cell NiMH batteries I’ll be using. They should be in today.
Getting there!
Of course, I HAD to see what the LEDs looked like all powered up. Only half of them are mounted here, and the cabling harness is… well, not what I would call top notch engineering… but this is a fully animated display right now, slowly cycling through the spectrum.
DAYAM these things are bright.