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.
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