Hobbies... Fursuit... Accessories
After an rather disappointing if moderately successful attempt at crafting a horn that glows....
I decided to do it properly rather than glue a bolt on the end of a battery powered glowstick.
This requires, LEDs, a power source, a few resistors, and optionally a controller. So I started playing around. I bought a breadboard, some LEDs, some resistors, and starting playing.
After burning up several LEDs, incidentally they make a snap-pop sound when they fail, I learned you can't forgo the resistors. I also learned that a micro-controller wasn't expensive. So I bought some fancier LEDs and an Arduino UNO at Radio Shack.
I think I'll use a two-ring setup with three of these:
Beauties on a random color fade with a second ring at the base providing accent lighting.
So far I have had decent luck with the Arduino's language, as it's a subset of C/C++ just like PHP which I wrote several projects in.
The most recent test yielded decent light output from two LEDs on a common circuit powered directly from the Arduino. This will have to. Yield to transistors and a parallel connection to the battery I'll eventually power the controller with.
While the UNO is a good platform for this stage, once I get the hardware in line and the code written I can migrate to a board the size of a shelled thumbdrive.
I'm getting giddy at the thought of adding a photosensitive sensor to adjust for current conditions, an a mic to pulse the effects in time to music.... As long as I can keep the program under 30k.
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