• First Steps

    Seamus Herson • 12/29/2019 at 21:15 • 0 comments

    I've seen some knockoffs of these panels, but haven't really liked the way that they seem to give up a lot of the modularity of the original project.  I wanted to see if I could find a way to reduce the cost of the nanoleaf panels by 50% and keep the slick and easy to use features that I liked.  

    Using a tear down of the nanoleaf aurora from the EEVBlog forums was helpful, and helped to inform the shape of the PCBs.   The commercially available panels use a proprietary communication protocol.  I don't want to reinvent the wheel, so I looked for a way to communicate over relatively long distances with relative ease.   I landed on using a CAN network. 

    To make this network work, I needed to implement a pair MCP2551 and MCP2515 chips on the board.  These communicate with the ATMega over SPI and encode/decode the data on the CAN bus.