Saturday, May 11, 2013

Flight Suit V3

The next version of the LED Flight Suit marches forward with WM, lots of headway on key components:
  • Three 16-channel, 12-bit pwm PCA9685 chips will operate MOSFET's to switch 48 LED strips.
  • Small sot23 smd MOSFETs (or these); the old ones (P16NF06's) were too overkill, too big. Overkill is still good but there's some math this time.
  • RC batteries for more power: peak 14.8V and 12A no problem, but will be <500mA most of the time.
  • Thinner, lighter LED strips with 120 LED's/m.
  • Arm-based remote control with a 1.3" OLED screen, dials/buttons/sliders/TBD.
    • The remote control will hopefully be a second Arduino-based system, a serial peripheral to the main suit system.
  • Multi-band audio analysis with MSGEQ7 or a separate Arduino FFT.
Most importantly WM is coding Arduino!  He already built a complete mode-switching, parameter-adjusting system with a figure diagram on-screen!  

We'll make the suits themselves-- the displays with LED strips-- when we have a working circuit and software: we don't know where everything's going yet.  So for a demo display I'm making a circuit board showing all 48 PCA9685 outputs on LED bars-- old school.  Here's the one I'm scrapping-- got too much rework:



and here's an MSGEQ7's output, from iphone audio, of seven values on a Sure Electronics 24x16 panel:



That display will also help when debugging and building the system.