Interactive holiday light display using LPD8806 (video)

[cjbaar]

Hey all... I just wanted to share my finished project using a 160-LED strip from adafruit. I created an interactive light display for the holidays this year, using an old rock band drum set and a midi sound generator. The lights have been up since late November, but I just finally got some semi-decent video posted.

Check out the videos of the idle and interactive drum modes here. I welcome any comments or questions!

Idle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcSJ5qFyM7M
Interactive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1m0e04-AI0

[cjbaar]

Here are a few snapshots of the equipment mounted on the wall. The arduino on the left is the main controller. It started out as an Uno, but I upgraded it to a Mega so that I could get extra hard serial ports to use for the MIDI interface, and still keep the original UART serial for debugging.

The second Arduino (on the right) was added later as a logger. Certain events on the main controller are sent (via serial) to the secondary board, which writes an event log to the SD card. It also has the ethernet shield, and is running the simple web server so that I can remotely view the log files and see if there has been any activity.

In the wide-angle shot, you can also see the timer, the large power supply, and the corner of the MIDI sound box.

[cjbaar]

A slightly better video has been posted here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09an1RehNVQ

[skibum]

That is awesome cjbarr! What a great idea - gets me thinking about projects for next Christmas already!

[danielo]

It looks brilliant, well done.

[skibum]

Again, this is a great project! Any chance you would be willing to publish your code?

[cjbaar]

Yes; one of these days. Like most projects, it got shelved after the holidays in favor of other ongoing projects, and I haven't updated the libs to be compatible with Arduino IDE 1.0. Probably as we get closer to the holidays this year, I will clean it up and post it. Thanks for your interest!

[cjbaar]

Finally, I have gotten off of my *** and updated the code to work with IDE 1.0. It is available at:
https://github.com/cjbaar/xmasStrip_v1
Be sure to check the readme for some of the hardware tricks I used.

[cjbaar]

skibum... hope you subscribed to this thread, because private messages still seem to be offline for some reason. The code is up, so hopefully you can make some sense of it. I expanded it a lot this year, and will be posting the new versions in a few weeks.