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The thought
Few clothes objects are as festive as a Christmas sweater, so what higher method is there to have fun the season than combining blinking lights with an unpleasant sweater? In his newest video, element14 Presents host Mark Harris units out to make one among his personal utilizing customized e-textile PCBs and conductive thread with the purpose of showcasing enjoyable lighting results and speedy board meeting.
Designing the {hardware}
The idea depends on many small boards that every help shiny RGB colours and the power to be chained collectively for extra complicated results. Due to these necessities and the necessity to hold prices low, Harris selected the ATtiny416 microcontroller IC. Every chip helps sufficient unbiased PWM channels for driving a complete of 4 LEDs: purple, inexperienced, blue, and white at various intensities. Even higher, the ATtiny416 helps single-wire programming which eliminates the necessity for a big ICSP or JTAG header.
PCB meeting and flashing
Harris wanted a lot of boards and quick, so he turned to his pick-and-place machine which might precisely supply and place the floor mount elements on the panel of PCBs with far better effectivity than doing it by hand. As soon as the solder paste had been reflowed, the following problem was how one can load the firmware onto every microcontroller. Attaching wires to each take a look at level is much too tedious, so a 3D printed jig was created that holds a sequence of pogo-pins in place and presses them onto the ability and single-wire programming take a look at pads.
Programming
The code for this challenge was written with the PlatformIO VS Code extension and set of board help packages which permits individuals aside from Harris, comparable to a bunch of woman scouts he mentors, to extra simply prolong this system. It begins by configuring the LEDs to solely present sure colours together with deciding on particular supported patterns comparable to fading or chained results. Then in the principle loop, it makes use of these flags to regulate the present colours and collect exterior inputs if configured. There may be even a random fade operate that picks a random colour and period to fade in every cycle.
Getting the sweater to work
As soon as Harris was assured the person boards would work, he moved onto the ultimate step of assembling them on the sweater. Energy is delivered by pairs of conductive thread which helps to reduce the voltage drop from their excessive resistance. The sweater was break up into three primary lighting zones, with the reindeer’s nostril being lit in a continuing purple glow, its antlers in a random fade sample, and the snowflakes close to the highest as a chasing white impact due to the additional enter/output pins for synchronizing patterns throughout a number of modules.
Future plans
As Harris states within the video, the sweater turned out nice, however there have been just a few areas he might deal with bettering in a later iteration. Primarily, he discovered the straightforward in/out communication scheme to be too primitive, so the following model would help UART throughout all modules for particular person, addressable management over the colours and brightness. To see extra in regards to the technique of constructing this festive LED sweater, you’ll be able to watch Harris’ video right here on the element14 Presents YouTube channel.
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