This pattern is called Row Your Boat. As one of the strips starts to get brighter, a nearby strip will join in the fading.  After completing a fade cycle, they start switching colors. There is a random strobe thrown in there as well.  The first 10 seconds are with a diffuser (piece of paper), the last 10 seconds are without.  The final panel will use a diffuser.

The colors have no correction yet, so red is really dim and green is really bright.  It looks like one of the channels of my TLC5940 is going bad.  The center LED strip’s blue is very dim.  I’m not going to look much into it right now though.  Instead, I will wait until I fab a PCB for the 5940 (this weekend?)

A couple of things I still want to do in the software:

  • Tone-down the red and green, to make the red seem brighter.  I am considering adding in strips of red-only, to help increase the red’s brightness.  I’m not sure how I will handle that in code though (maybe just tie them to the same pin on the TLC5940?)
  • Randomly change the cycle’s starting point (will wait until more strips are added.)
  • Optimize the code a little more.  It is just over 3k now, which seems big.
  • Alter the fade timing on some of the color branches.
  • Along with that, add some infrastructure to alter some of the variables being used.  Control could happen over the serial port and/or on-board switches (which will be added with the PCB.)
Author

Fan of making things beep, blink and fly. Created AddOhms. Writer for Hackster.io News. Freelance electronics content creator for hire! KN6FGY and, of course, bald.

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