Close

Picture Time!

A project log for LED Light Clock

Two 1-meter strings of APA104 LEDs, one ESP32

jon-kunkeeJon Kunkee 12/02/2020 at 06:500 Comments

I had my phone handy and was putting it back where it goes, so I stopped to get a better selection of photos. You'll find them after the break!

Web UI Screenshot
This is what the web UI looks like in Firefox on Windows.
color_demo pattern glamor shot
This shot shows off the color_demo pattern. It's LEDs on camera, so it's not a great shot, but the colors are pretty. :) (Color cycles are implemented by walking HSV coordinates around the color wheel.)
blurrrrrrry perspective shot
Here you can somewhat make out the status LED pattern. The furthest seven or so LEDs reflect the state of various subsystems of the firmware, and the rest encode seconds since Unix epoch in on-off binary. Sorry about how blurry this one came out.
elevation detail showing aluminum superstructure with LED layer
This shows off just how simple construction was: glue premade LED strips from Sparkfun onto a piece of aluminum.
current_time pattern shot
Here you can kind of make out the 'current time' pattern, which displays the current time, date, day of the week, and other details like whether DST is being corrected for in BCD. One color separates fields while another separates digits, and double field separators mark logical divisions like date from time.
up close and personal with the connectors
This shows off the connectors dangling off the far end of the device. I could add more strips here if I wanted to, but really I just screwed up and placed the two strips so they couldn't daisychain.
more zoomed-out color_showcase shot
This is the same photo as further up, just before rotation and cropping. It gives a better feel for how it looks in a room as opposed to being useful for the project page banner.
meat and potatoes: the power and compute connections
The 5V power comes in at the bottom and connects to the case, which in turn houses the ESP32 module and the wiring. The wires exit from the opposite side of the box and run to the strips themselves. Power runs straight from the supply to the strips, while data comes from the ESP32.
better-lit and better-focused version of the previous picture without LEDs blowing the contrast out
This is essentially a better-lit and better-focused version of the previous picture without LEDs blowing the contrast out.
C'thulu wires
The mop of wires running power and data from the case to the strips is a little messy. I would like to have planned better for it.
another color showcase shot, this time with only one strip visible
This is another color showcase shot, this time with only one strip visible
up close and personal with the power socket
I don't know why, but I figured I'd share a really close-up picture of the really-not-special power connector.

I hope you liked seeing a little more of this silly-simple thing I built. :)

Discussions