The *Brite modules are generally setup to receive the shifted data from the SPI I/O port. This leads to good performance and fast updates since they are being hardware driven. Unfortunately I needed those pins for an older project I was working on which used the ShiftBrite shield and an Ethernet shield so I had rewired the ShiftBrite Shield to use other pins so the Ethernet shield could use the hardware SPI.  The owner over at Macetech helped me build a bit-banging interface to do the SPI I/O to the ShiftBrites via software.  The AtmoLight Clone project uses the stock Macetech code which made it easy to replace with my modified ShiftBrite driver code.  This different code is slower on the output, but it’s not noticeable on a small number of ShiftBrites with limited data.

I mounted the ShiftBrite modules onto the back of my primary 21″ monitor.  I have 2 ShiftBrite modules which point upwards, 2 to the left, 2 pointing down and 2 to the right with one MegaBrite module pointing straight back in the center for the summary channel.

Once your hardware and software on the Arduino you need to interface it to your computer.  The Atmo interfaces connect through the Serial/Com port at 38400 baud.  If your computer supports the USB com port of the Arduino, you should be able to connect to it.  Make sure in the setup section of your code that you only have one serial start statement, and that it’s set for 38400.

I tried two different ways to get the data to the Arduino.  The first was to use an older version of VideoLan/VLC Player.  The current version of VLC (as of 8/21/2010) does not seem have the built-in Atmo output code. If you’re putting something like this together, check to see if the new versions have it, the author of the VLC Atmo module said on another forum that he was working to get the Built-In Atmo code back into the package.

The Atmo plugin for VLC works very well, capturing average colors from the top, bottom, left, right and middle portions of the video it’s playing (as seen in the screen shot below from AtmoWin) and outputting that color information to the Arduino/ShiftBrite LED modules. It’s pretty quick and there are a lot of options which you can set to vary how quickly the lights respond, if they fade slowly or if they adapt quickly to the video input.  You can adjust the white balance of your modules, set a color for the LEDs to fade to in case you pause the video, and set a color that the LEDs will display once the video is complete.

The second option I tried is AtmoWin, which is for Windows only and in German. It takes a few minutes to figure out what all the stuff stands for, and Google translate may be helpful as well. I believe this software is written by the guy in the main project page.  This software runs in your system tray and has several output modes such as Atmo-Classic, Dummy(shows what the program is sampling), DMX, Null Device, Multi-Atmo (run up to 4 Atmo devices on 4 Com ports) and MondoLight.  The software captures the entire screen and is not limited to just a video window.  It does the same 5 point capture pattern, but of whatever you have showing in your desktop.  You can set the capture framerate (it defaults to 25).  The response time for this software seems very quick on my computer. AtmoWin also supports multiple monitors and you can choose which monitor the system will capture.

One thing to note is that when running some games in full screen mode it cannot capture the colors.  I ran Battlefield: Bad Company 2 in a full screen -window- however and it worked fine, adding some great effects to my gaming sessions!

This is the link to the main project page which provided me the information to build my own setup, make sure to check it out after watching my video below.

Fun3′s Blogspot Page – AtmoLight Clone

Arduino with Shiftbrites with AtmoWinX – Link to the YouTube video below in case the embedded player doesn’t work for you.

It’s kind of weird around here, few of the immediate neighbors have put up lights. I’ve always been a big Christmas light fan.  They’re fairly easy to put up and take down and add a festive look to things.  Still to go are the 600 or so blue/white light string, plus the big RGB LED bulbs which color shift and do different things.  Those will go on a tree  in the left side yard this year.

LEDs are of course a wonderful option if you wish to be environmentally conscious with your holiday and Christmas lighting.  LEDs are much more energy efficient than a normal lamp light bulb.  Incandescent lamps provide a warmer glow, one of the reasons for this is that they use a small piece of tungsten wire for a filament.  As electricity runs through the filament it heats up to the point that it glows and puts off light, but in order to create that light they also create a lot of heat.  As much as 80% of their power consumption can be waste heat.  It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that we don’t need to be heating the great outdoors in the middle of the Winter.

It used to be that LED Christmas Lights were much more expensive than the standard glass bulb type, but over the last few years the prices have rapidly decreased and become much more competitive. While you may still pay a bit more for LED lights, you also get the benefits of long life, high brightness and reliability.  Most LEDs manufactured have a lifespan of 11 years, if they’re run at full brightness non-stop.  Assuming they do not get damaged in storage or while being put up, they should last a long.  Occasionally an LED lamp does fail before the 11 years, but replacements are usually included with the strings when you buy them. Just make sure to put them in a safe location should you need them later.

Here is the most recent picture of the walk aka the kiddie pool during a recent rainstorm.  It’s important to remember to add proper drainage to your digging areas, or this happens.  There is a drain trench that leads to the roadside cliff edge, but it’s not deep enough.  If it were not for this drain trench, the excavation area would have been filled to the top.  This weekend I hope to get more material removed, it’s quite a piece of work for me because my body deteriorates quickly with heavy labor due to the rheumatoid arthritis, however I know we’ll get it done eventually, and most importantly before winter. The stairs will be getting removed and the sidewalk concrete will extend to the edge of the deck, then new steps will be built and secured to the concrete pad to make everything nice and solid.  The steps are in not-so great condition, though still strong but I think new steps will look great.

New sidewalk excavation

REACTOR BIPLANE

Aside from ditch digging we built a model biplane over the weekend and got some airtime on it.  The biplane is a Electrifly (Great Planes) ‘Reactor Bipe’.  It’s an electric biplane with a 38″ or so wingspan. I probably would have been better off buying some repair parts for the heli and a new radio but this looked really neat and hopefully it’ll help me blend in with the plane guys more at the R/C field.  The electric motor is a .15 equivilant size, theoretically, though I somewhat doubt it, it still does a pretty good job.

Electrifly Reactor Biplane

The Reactor Bipe was originally built with the suggest Futaba 3114 servos, but these tended to strip really easy and it got frustrating running out of servos.  I purchased some new gearsets for the servos, but they will be used in some other, lighter project because they just really don’t hold up in this application.  I replaced the servos with the Hitech HS-65MGs I was using in the Mini-Titan helicopter and things improved GREATLY, these servos really have the needed strength for the large control surfaces and are pretty fast as well.

The Reactor built pretty quickly, you do have to be careful about a few points. I noticed after assembly that using the pre-cut hinge slots that one ailerone was a bit lower than the one on the opposing wing.  Double check the position of the hinge slots and everything else if you are concerned.  Additionally where they recommend to use 30 minute epoxy, I’d definetly go that route.  The manual for the tail includes and update sheet to use CA to adhear the horizontal stab, rather than epoxy.  I suspect this is because epoxy could drip and cause the elevator tie rod thing to become bound.  Even with CA this is possible, be careful when applying the CA glue to the horizontal stab.  Additionally when gluing the control rods to the clevises, make sure the thin CA doesn’t drip into the joint.  It will adhere them solidly, and while you think that you escaped disaster because the arm and surface still moves, you’ll quickly discover that this is only because the clevis is slowly twisting itself apart, instead of actually rotating in the control horn.

The manual comes with recommended control throws for low rates, high rates, and 3d.  If you use the recommended control arm holes and low rates, you’ll find that the control is very grainy/low-resultion.  You have to turn the travel/ATV down so far, that you are only using a very small portion of the bandwidth for each channel, and you can actually see each step in the control surfaces.  This is bad because you loose a lot of precision.  I would recommend using the outer holes in the control horns on the control surfaces, and the inner holes on the servo control arms if you just want to start out easy.

I’ve put in 4 flights in the last two nights, all of them were great although the plane is pretty ‘touchy’ on the controls.  I will probably work in some exponential to make the middle of the controls softer, as I feel this would be okay for a plane (I don’t like expo on helis).

Electrifly Reactor Biplane Side View

Reactor Bipe Airborne

COPPER VAPOR LASER

Another side project which has been absorbing my time is the Copper Vapor Laser project. I’ve been building a tube furnace for this laser since the bore of the laser, where the copper vapor and helium (or neon) is energized by the electricity needs to be heated up to 800 degrees F for a copper chloride/bromide type solution.  While the tube furnace I am building is overkill as I actually wish to build a version of this laser using elemental copper.  The disadvantage of using elemental copper is that it requires extremely high temepratures, in the range of 1500 degrees celcuius (almost 2800 degrees Fahrenheit).  Because of this I have been lovingly crafting the furnace out of high temeperature ceramic fibers (Inswool), ceramic boards (Insboard) and a variety of refractory mortars.  For the bromide/chloride lasers, heat will be provided by a nichrome heater element(s) with no problem.  In order to reach operating temperature for the elemental copper vapor laser, I will probably use one or two propane torches inside of the cavity.

The bore for the CuCl/CuBr laser is a quartz tube, the bore for the elemental copper (Cu) laser will be a high temperature alumina ceramic bore.

The advantage of an elemental copper laser is that you do not require a double pulse power supply.  With a Cu Chloride or Bromide laser, you have to hit it once with a disassociation pulse, and a second time with the lasing pulse.  With elemental copper you don’t need to disassociate the copper from a bromide or chloride solution, so one step is saved there, at the cost of extreme temperatures.

Copper Vapor Lasers have been used in some of Pink Floyd’s shows, they produce powerful golden yellow and soothing green laser lines (beams).  Additionally CVL lasers have been used for the purpose of enriching uranium.  While I am a scientist at heart and love to explore all sorts of different realms, I don’t think that enriching uranium would be a recommended pastime, so I probably won’t explore that part of science!

Here are some pictures of the tube furnace in progress.  I’ve gotten much further, but don’t have pictures at this time. I will update my laser site later. This is the furnace for the CuCl/CuBr version of the laser.  For the elemental copper version of the laser, this will probably end up encased in an additional external Inswool blanket wrap to bring up the insulation value and retain more heat inside the core.

The Arduino IDE is pretty flexible and easy to build with and it includes a built in serial monitor so you can send reports back from your little project. Additionally there are quite a few example projects and a reasonable resource base on the internet for finding out most anything you need to do whatever you might want to do.

My project is pretty generic, it’s a simple lighting system with LEDs. I chose the MegaBrite, ShiftBrite and OctoBrites because they’re already built and they’re pretty easy to program.  They use a bit-shift register so in order to send data to 20 of them, you just stream out 20 sets of data to the set and there you go.  There’s libraries for them so you don’t have to do all the bit shifting yourself.  You basically just need to send the data to an array for LED position and RGB values (0 – 1023) and your set.  I was very happy with how easy this was to setup, and the guy over at MaceTech has been very helpful with some non-common questions I had.   The MegaBrite modules were around $10 each, the ShiftBrite around $5, and the OctoBrites a bit more expensive at $24.   The arduino itself only cost $29.95!!

You can’t beat a deal like that, $29.95 for a completely programmable microcontroller development set, ready to plug and play (you could beat it if you built the programmer and other circuitry yourself, but.. I like things ‘ready to go’.)

I wanted to be able to control these LEDs via a serial port, and I’m a terrible computer programmer type, however I’m most familiar with PHP/MYSQL, etc.   I originally downloaded the NetBeans IDE for Java and tried to write a Java control program. Trying to do serial communications in Java is a bit of a nightmare, because most of the libraries are old, unsupported or broken.  Though there may be one way to do serial for Java pretty easily, I’ll cover that next.

I gave up on Java after a DAY of trying to find a working serial library.  I resorted back to PHP to see what could be done there.  I downloaded XAMPP from Apache Friends which is a complete web server, php, mysql, etc solution.  Everything you need to experiment with PHP on your PC without installing Linux and other things. I had originally tried the php_serial class.  It didn’t work, period and also there are some possible coding deficiencies discovered after reading various message boards.  It is a good library to use if you want to communicate in Linux, but I wouldn’t recommend it for window.

After a bit more search I found some references to SerProxy, it’s basically a proxy server that works as an interface between your Windows serial ports and any programming language which can do TCP/IP network communications. There are pre-compiled windows versions available or you can compile it yourself. I found a few examples online and within minutes had my PHP application sending the control codes to the Arduino code I had written.  It’s so much faster than php_serial seemed to be (long delays). It didn’t cost anything and it also supports 2 way connections in PHP under Windows, something that the php_serial class did not provide.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time playing with this little project of mine, as well as I am busy working on building a copper vapor laser.  You can keep up to date with my laser projects over at my laser blog .  Quite a few things to distract me from working on the house and such.  This weekend though we will be working on digging out the base for the new concrete front sidewalk and I will be posting pictures and information about that so stay tuned!

We had some timed exposure fun tonight out in the yard.  I’m surprised one of us wasn’t mauled by a possum or rogue coyote but we got some good pics.   A couple of the pics were taken with sparklers, and the rest used flashlights, the YesCo LED Pen and a laser pointer.

I drew on the side of the house with the laser pointer as an experiment.  It turned out ‘ok’ though I wish the streetlight hadn’t flooded the area so much.  Live in the middle of nowhere and the only streetlight within half a mile is right in front of my house.

See the descriptions on the pictures for info about what was used.  When you click a picture, use the left and right icons at the bottom of the pictures to move through the list.

If interested, check out my other Light Art Posts

Hey if you have a good camera, try this out, upload your pics to a web server and link your site or source for images and I’ll link with credit!  Looking for amateur ‘just tried it’ type pics.  Use the ‘comment’ link on the right to send me a message, or post a comment with the info and I’ll authorize it through.

I cropped some of these photo’s and cut the resolution back.   I used a laser pointer, iPod Touch with the free ‘flashlight’ app, a color changing LED pen I got from the guys at YesCo at the sign show down in Florida and a blowtorch.    Since the sort of thing YesCo deals with is the kind of thing I work with at my day job, I have a lot of LED lighting resources at hand, so I think this is something I’ll continue to experiment with.   Stay tuned!

If interested, check out my other Light Art Posts

And in reference to my animal books lower down in the blog this is great