RGB Propeller Clock
Contents |
Team Members
- Allan Wang, senior ECE
- Costas Akrivoulis, junior ECE
- John Howland, senior MechE
- Jitu Das, junior CS
Final video
Video of the RGB propeller clock in action
Project Description
Spin the RGB stick I made a while ago. Make a clock and cool shapes on it.
Inspiration: [1]
Mechanical: Need to transfer power to the stick (~2A max) which is spinning. There's some information here: [2] Not exactly sure how to do this.
Electrical: Microcontroller controls the 4x TLC5947 per RGB stick which are 24-channel, 12-bit shift registers that drive the 32 RGB LED's. A Hall effect sensor at the end of the stick measures whenever the stick passes a certain fixed point, allowing the microcontroller to sync up the rotation speed and refresh rate, allowing display of arbitrary images which should be stable. This should be relatively straightforward-ish
Interfacing: It is feasible to transfer power to the spinning device through the motor's brushes, which would require two conductors. However, control signals will be difficult to pass through. The MCU controls the stick with 3 control signals: CLK, DATA, and LATCH. One way to do it is to spin the MCU, and use wireless to communicate with the MCU from another device that isn't spinning.
Daily Log
I'll be posting daily updates of this project to my electronic gadgets blog.
Parts List
- RGB stick
- mbed microcontroller Decently fast and easy to program
- Hall Effect sensor
- Wireless (Zigbee/Bluetooth/random RF transmitter? not sure)
