MASON, PILLSBURY WINTHROP S 1200 SEVENTEENTH STREET, NW WASHINGTON, DC 20036 (202)663-8195 [phone]; Main Studio.
And finally, a piece of a datasheet showing a circuit example able to generate the 400 Volts anode signal from a 200 Volts source. Test Drive I reproduced the circuit on a breadboard as well, using a 180V ‘nixie’ power supply. Motivated by this success, I started Kicad and designed a PCB. I Selected SMT components in order to reduce the size of the 64 anode drivers and the 64 cathode drivers. The board arrived as perfect as usual with OSHPark. And they are working! Cabling and soldering There is 92 components and 34 wires on each of the 8 boards to solder.
As I don’t own a air soldering station, I did everything with a good iron and solid patience. But it was worth the effort, they all work great. Interface I used the same micro-controller as the to talk with the high voltage boards. Especially because it has at least the 32 outputs needed. To interface this controller with the outside world and being able to display some useful pictures, I used the serial port. I could then make a tiny Java program that copy part of the computer screen and send it to the serial port. Fun with Pixel Dust I was quite amazed by the code demonstrated on a 64×64 led matrix by Adafruit.
So why not trying this on the IGG1 display? I have a MPU-9250 IMU and a raspberry-pi zero. However I need to adapt the code for this accelerometer, and send the data to the screen with the serial port. I’m more comfortable with Java than C or python, then I translate the code from in Java. To conclude The full story and details are on the hackaday.io page here: Sources and schematics are on the following github repository: It was really a good time see this screen getting back to life, now it needs a purpose such as a weather forecast display or a nice clock. A lot is possible with the raspberry pi, including the use of the PIR sensor to only turn on the screen when someone is around. Christmas lightnings around houses are not my favorite, however I like the atmosphere of warm little candles put on the bottom borders of the windows.
That’s the starting point of a long and lazy digression. Instead of burning continuously paraffin wax, could we make a reusable electronic one? Of course, there is tons of cheap products available.
But they are somehow not really convincing me. And I’m not the first one to look on that subject. I’ll try here to summarize what I’ve found and what I’ve enjoyed to do. Sources and drawings can be found in. Over internet: You can spend a lot of time completely lost on internet as I did, by just googling ‘led candle’ or ‘flickering led’ or ‘micro controller candle’ etc I’ve found a nice blog post about the. It is really worth a read, he details everything from measurements to analysis, and reproduce the algorithm. This is followed by another post which really interested me.
The real flame. Courtesy To summarize, and as probably everyone knows, the candle flame brightness has two types of behavior. Usually it is rather constant, and it happens some time that the brightness starts to oscillate for one or two seconds. One thing I can add to that is the flame is gently moving, from one side to another one. Another property of the flame is its light spectrum.
And here as well, a lot of people studied this. It is a very warm light with plenty of red / infra-red. We can find some measurements from 1000 to 2000K of color temperature.
Start the Project: We roughly know what to mimic, so let’s choose some components according these constraints. For the LED, I looked for the warmest white on the range of 10-20 mA.
My ‘local’ provider is Farnell, so after some sorting and filtering I end up with a, €0.18. To add a bit of challenge I choose a very small micro-controller, but still accessible with my tools and knowledge.
The has only 6 pins, 64 bytes of RAM and 256 bytes of program memory. But it has 2 PWM output and an ADC, all for €0.42 To power everything from an AA battery I choose to use a step up converter. The €0.38 is able to output 50mA at 3.3V from a single AA battery, and is working down to 0.35V.
From this point we can control and power two led and read an analogue value such as the ambiant luminosity (using a photo-resistor for example). It is possible to mimic the flame swing by balancing the brightness of the two LED, plus the random oscillations with the total brightness. We can switch off the LEDs when the day is too bright as well.
Code contraints and Prototyping: After some soldering I manage to put the components on a small development boards and start coding. I used the Microchip IDE and their XC8 C compiler.
The challenge here is that the compiler is in ‘free’ mode, so the compiled code is rather large. I didn’t want to use assembly mainly because I’m not quite confident to prototype with it. But I admit it is the preferable way to do something with only 256 bytes of program available.
It’s perfectly legit to argue that an ATtiny10 would at least do the job better. I should invest time to the AVR side one day! After many iteration to reduce the program size, I end up with only 4 free bytes. Some C operations give more compact program for the same function (for example initialisation to 0 or an arbitrary value).
The code uses the famous as random generator. The flame position, the speed to go from one to the other position, the oscillations occurrence and their period number are random. The two LEDs are dimmed with the build in PWM, and the speed of change with the Timer0. It is still open to more complex code as I can use the PIC10F322 with 512 bytes of program space (or even ATtiny10 which seems to be almost pin compatible). I acquired the two LEDs PWM signal with my recently acquired: And plot them with a quick and dirty Java program: You can notice the oscillation mode on the chart after 4th second, and the flame swing mode surrounding it. For the oscillations, the total brightness is changing while otherwise it stays constant at 50% (the sum of the two led brightness). Getting serious with a PCB: Let’s startup Kicad, do the schematics and play a bit with the PCB drawing.
I have in mind a design for a 3D printed case, we’ll see that later. Several times now I ordered PCB from OSHPark, and never been disappointed.
I could use their manufacturing precision to down size the board area up to 17x17mm,. I let an option for a push button, we never know Less serious with the 3D shape: It is time to think how to hold everything together. I applied for the free student Fusion360 licence. I have to say the program is very nice to handle and to learn. The idea is to hold the battery on the PCB with the three part threads. Just screw them together and it should light-up. The only compromise is the ground wire that goes from the PCB to the bottom part along the battery body.
I also made a join part to be able to have some versions with two AA battery stacked, making it taller and with a longer battery life. Then I removed the dust of my printer, far from the best printer nowadays, but the cheapest when it went out. Soldering and programming: And the boards crossed the Atlantic ocean and arrived in the mailbox! It’s always a pleasure to solder components on these high quality boards (even 0805 with a soldering iron).
To program the PIC, I forgot to order some 1.27mm spacing pin headers. However, there is a solution with two 2.54mm ones: Life-time: I don’t own yet a, so the current measurement I did with my actual (too) cheap one is rather approximate. I got around 12mA with the LEDs on, and around 4mA in sleep mode, drawn from the battery. Maybe the current of the sleep mode is still high due to the step-up circuit, which runs all the time However it stays on at least 3 consecutive days on a single AA Ni-MH rechargeable battery. I logged the battery voltage of one candle with my raspberry-pi. It start with a fully charge single AA Ni-MH battery and I remove the sleeping mode: Final result: It is rather hard to catch the effect on a video, as the aim was to create a LED candle as quiet as a real candle could be. Thanks for reading!
(and my apologies for the approximate language). Here is an attempt to give some information on the wireless probes I’m using with my.
The wireless link is performed by modules. 1- Reception The data reception is done by directly connect a nRF24l01 module on the raspberry pi SPI port. And the configure and handle the data reception/treatment, thanks to the.
2- The probe To sense temperature without using long wires, there is a constraint to consider: the wireless module powering. It could be for example from a solar panel, or from a battery. Using a solar panel is not always possible. In case of measuring outside temperature, the solar panel should be deported to the sensor, as the sensor should not be exposed to the sun.
Moreover, the charging circuit efficiency is critical for small sized module. Powering only using battery simplifies the module but requires very low consumption component to last a reasonable time. The nRF24l01 wireless transceiver is very efficient on that way.
To keep a very low consumption, I choose the temperature sensor. It is precise and uses the same SPI communication protocole as the nRF24l01 module. To manage these components, I choose the microchip. The schematics files of the module below could be find on the. As well as the. The code put the micro-controller in sleep mode for roughly 4 seconds between each temperature measurements and transmissions. And the all circuit is powered directly from two AA Ni-MH batteries.
Each components could still work down to the lower battery voltage of roughly 2 volts, and charged batteries are around 2.6 volts which is below the max 3.3 volts of the RF module. I didn’t yet make printed circuits, then I use prototyping board such as. For the moment, I did two of these probes.
One is outside in a waterproof case powered by two 1000 mAh AAA Ni-MH batteries, and one on the attic, powered by two 2000 mAh AA batteries. I don’t have yet a full battery life-time. I can see the battery voltage decreasing very slowly over a month, but Ni-MH discharging curves are rather flat for low current.
I will update this post once probe stopped working! Edit: After 100 days of sending 12 bytes of data every 4 seconds, I think we can conclude the overall circuit does not consume too much energy. The two AAA 1000mAh battery voltage only drop by 40 mV.
Let see if this can last one year! This entry was posted in and tagged, on.