In this festive time of the year, Christmas lights are also a main character. We have Christmas lights surrounding us everywhere from the beginning of December, and it is always interesting to see the new ideas of people everywhere. Lately, it has become very popular to have light shows alongside with popular songs, and synchronize the rhythm to the movement of the lights.
IDEA
My idea is to control a small set of Christmas Lights alongside with the music I program using MSP in order to create a visual sequence. In the previous video, you can see a huge display where the whole house is decorated with Christmas lights, but my project won't go that big. I plan on building a small structure which is illuminated with a LED light strip smoothly alongside with the rhythm of the music, like you can see in the following videos:
Color LED light bulb In this reference, the developer used a microphone in order to alternate the change of colors according to the information received by the microphone.
This is a much more simpler example of installation with only three LED lights, in the original video, the lights dance to the music. Bottle LED light
ESTRUCTURE
I am still undecided between two external designs.
-My first idea, is to light a cylindrical container. My main inspiration is the device ALEXA from amazon, but in my case, it would be a transparent cylinder where you can see the light changed.
-The second idea, is to create a rectangular exoskeleton with Christmas lights, or LED light stripes hanging from it as a waterfall. In the video, we can see a huge cube with the LED lights on the sides of the cube, I want my lights to be hanging from top to bottom. LED light cube
INITIAL DEVELOPMENT
I have been following two main tutorials, in order to create a hybrid code with the instructions of the reference projects and my final idea. The main projects I follow are:
-Christmas Light show with Arduino This is the main tutorial for the first video of this imput. Here is a step by step of the developer's project. The code is also available.
-Arduino rhythm LED light box This is the second part of my tutorials.
With these examples, and tutorials, I am starting to merge the sections of the codes that might help me start controlling the light. Once I have this, I will decide in which design direction must I choose.
FIRST ATTEMPT In the first attempt, I tried using the 16 channel Relay Module and using the Christmas light tutorial. I was able to upload a code to it, but it wasn't being transmitted to the LED light installation.
It was a little frustrating, as it was the winter break and couldn't really move forward with this technique. I kept looking online for an easier way for me to be able to communicate Max and Arduino with the LED lights.
A little while later, I found a very helpful tutorial, which allowed me to communicate arduino with my set of LEDs. [1]. I followed this tutorial and to my surprise, it really worked.
This is the arduino connection I used as instructed by the tutotial:
And this is my connection:
And here you can find the video of when it first worked.
CONNECTING THE CODE TO MAX
In this point, I talked to my teacher Miga, and he gave me a little clue to try to use the old patch I had used in a previous exercise and try to connect it to the new code I had in the arduino software. I tried several ways, until I realized that the easiest way was exactly modifying the code I had already programed a while before.