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Major Milestone Reached!

A project log for ⭐SparkLΞD Control

A ESP8266 based controller for Individually addressable LED Strips and Strings, with 3D map, OLED / Rotary controller Menu and Web UI.

h00gieH00GiE 12/05/2018 at 16:060 Comments

Caution: More Milestones Up Ahead

Last update I mentioned the screen and the rotary encoder were working on the new software and hardware.
Logic next step is to make the menu system work.
Well finally it's that time, menu system was developed around a totally different system. (WS2812FX project)
So it had to be adapted.

Fortunately the software by Jason Coon is so well written; I could even cut out the middle man code, and control the variables directly: mode/pattern, brightness, speed, Red, Green, Blue (although i might want to switch to brightness and Hue.) are fully synced between the web interface and the screen, and both can be controlled independently and will update on any event. (you can control it on the screen/encoder and it will update the web interface, and you can click any on the web interface and the screen will change in realtime.)

This however, is not the end, there are many more milestones up ahead, here's a few example milestones:

Pics or it didn't happen!

You're absolutely right, time for a beauty pic:

This is the menu showing on the Prototype.
I'm using a adafruit 8 x 5050 bar as testing led strip.
2 lines on the yellow part of the OLED display are broken, so the letters may look weird/broken.
The led strip is so ungodly bright, I had to make the shutter-speed extremely short not to over-expose the image, hence the dark surroundings.
The picture however does give a rather nice representation of how the finished product will look in the dark.

So What's Next?

Obviously the list of milestones describes above is leading.
The major priority is debug and adding the user friendly WIFI configuration.
the debugging should be done in the next few days.
I might actually rewrite the menu system to optimize for Jason's software,
because i had to dirty patch the menu to work with the WS2812FX libary.
It would be best to go back to clean code.

the prototype internals, yes it's riddled with hotsnot (hot glue) and scratches gaps and other unwanted things, but that's what prototypes are for.

As far as the hardware redesign concerned, i was going to switch all the connectors to JST XH 2.54mm pitch connectors.
So to build the prototype i bought a box of assortment JST connectors. However my crimp tool does not have the correct size dies installed, so i'll be ordering a new crimp tool.. 

Advise on tools is appreciated, i'm looking for a semi budget tool to crimp the tiny JST XH leads, not the unusable cheap ones, and neither the > $100 ones.

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