The room is filling with light.

With all the nodes so far active the room gets pretty bright in some situations but that's kinda the point. These displays are running really electrically efficiently so far. I can run my Xmas tree that I built a couple years ago from a old little fake tree I got at target that the lights long ago failed on. (I could fix them, but I rather experiment) I have 3 ports of a 6 port USB phone charger running the 300 or so ws2812s on the tree.

I've yet to put it to a Kill-A-Watt test as I don't have one anymore (shit blew up on me)... but I'm probably safe in assuming it's quite energy efficient compared to the original lights with the added benefit of animations and complete control over the color of the light coming out of each bulb. I did one long flat string of ws2812bs up the center of the tree, added a big ol ring of ws2812s for the top covered in some stretched out cotton balls to diffuse the light and look a little like snow. Plus the outer layer of WS2811s which have that diffusing lens already added and I tried to diffuse them through garland with mixed results. I may have to add more snow like surfaces to the tree in order to get a better looking diffuse across some parts... give it some more texture with diffusion surfaces?

Anyway, today I am going through some parts to repurpose some dead/fried MCUs I got. I know the USB pass-through is actually still working for the power supply so I have just written a D on the dead ones and taken to using them as power sources for dumb lights without all the channel addressing and whatnot. I got these fire flicker LEDs they use in fake candles in orange and red... currently have the orange configured on one of these dead-micro-controller-turned-power-supplies along a 3v3 line and will be adding some of the red as well and projecting them at a diffuse panel to see if I can't get some kinda weird ring-y fire effect.

I also have this Electroluminescent wire I am not sure however how to drive it. Every version of it I have has some mysterious black box potted in resin and I just don't want to risk killing them. I suppose I could look it up online.

Well slap my noodle and call me a poodle. That's how ya do it. Thanks Adafruit, I find a lot of useful stuff on your site and have bought a few of your products to mess around with or to use in projects. I just dug up a circuit playground express I bought for an ornament build a couple years ago and plan to try and incorporate it into my lighting platform. I'll have to see what I can do there, will take a bit of research before planning.

Alright, the next phase I think requires some clay, craft wire and soldering a data line back on one of my ws2812 rings. I've got a little fire flicker display... could use more red but I am unable to find the red ones so I traded out some with the yellow-orange ones I just got. Now my bathroom looks like it's perpetually on fire but that's fine I plan to add some more stuff to that light later to make it a little more like a little fireplace in the crapper.

The ring I have is just large enough to go around the outside of the center large crystal so I can add some accent crystals around it with the busted quartz bits I have. I gotta lay a clay ring around the main ring and fit the crystals one per light over the ring and seal the light from leaking around them and make sure it only goes through them.

Soldered a couple ws2812 configurations and added them as individually controlled nodes. This gives me a total of 5 nodes to work with, also got a few lights that are more simple I can use like my light fake fires and my UV straw hats that can interact with any fluorescent paints I might add.

Alright, I added some more clay to hold the crystals properly and have created the first few crystal nodes as units. The clay is cheap and easy to break apart if things need adjustment later so if it dries funny or I want to change something it will be pretty easy to fix.

I've done a little testing today with it, uploading a video of said testing. Man, I wish I had more weed right about now. Seems to be working out well for me on this project. I know I can't smoke weed all the time, but if I could find a balance for every month I think I can get some pretty cool projects built and coded. Some people get high and watch cartoons, I get high and build stuff or make pixel art or play music. Sometimes I do watch cartoons though, but I am getting off track.

The crystal lantern bench is almost ready for me to start writing the back-end software. I need one more cluster of nodes which will hopefully be here Saturday and then I can start modelling the networking and data.

Still waiting on this thermal paste, too.

Maybe a good thing, not sure. Managed to get the majority of this test bench for the light platform built in a way similar to how I hope to use it at a larger scale. Figured out how the platform will function and wrote it out in my notebook with diagrams and all that fun shit. Saturday I will have all I think I should need for building the framework of the platform and start testing the back-end then I can move on to building the simulator.

If you for some reason like my weird rambling and strange projects or just want to contribute to getting me stones so I can come up with these project please consider subscribing to this blog (payments handled by stripe). If you want to commission one of these it's going to be a bit before I can sell any but I am open to offers if anyone is interested. E-mail me if you're interested.

Otherwise if you just wanted to throw a couple bones my way to help out you can also contact me via e-mail.

Anyway here's the current test version...

I may also start building some little fake candles to add some cool lighting to the house if the thermal paste ends up taking til next month.  At least, I hope to.

As for me right now, I need to do some more testing and cleanup while this clay hardens and the video processes.

Cheers.