Encabulating Photon Emission Interface

My small lab assistant and I tossed our hats in the ring and were invited to compete in the 2013 Red Bull Creation competition. In short, it was great. Team swan tron didn’t make it to the finals, (this year, suckers) but had a great time and learned a ton. Dual hats off to the six teams heading to NY for the last phase…you all earned it.

Team swan tron entered for consideration an Encabulating Photon Emission Interface.

team swan tron
team swan tron

Red Bull’s concept was simple and brilliant…the accepted applicants were given custom Arduino shields, a whole bunch of LEDs, and a path to a git repo containing a library with which to make them crank. That, about four weeks, and a nudge to do something awesome with lights. We did this…

We used all of the PWM channels at our disposal to handle the colors on our Encabulating Interface, and tossed in some analog stuff for good measure. Our software utilized the Encabulator’s accelerometer values as the interface’s interfacing variables, which is nice. Most of the board’s function was exercised, as was my brain, Emma’s brain, and Emma in general. She liked the feedback in a belly laugh way…so that is that. Pretty sure she and I both came out ahead on this effort.

Here’s to 2014…look out for team swan tron.

rbcreation

In the home stretch…

turbullenhelpulator
examine the reflection…

…which I thought would be a slam dunk. As it turns out, the programming phase for team swantron is a laborious thing at best. Code is boring. I knew that coming in, but Emma picked up on my ruse…we do a lot of jumper-ing breadboards in programming phase.

Saturday should be interesting.

Encabulation

Quick update on the Red Bull Creation status.

tur bull encabulation
grnd efx 2k13

We’re turbull encabulating…

I’m lacking a sufficient power source to push a ton of these LEDs simultaneously, so that is that for now. Power brick and a back-up strip are in the mail, so ambition will dictate how bright we go with this. The physical stuff is largely roughed-out, so now the challenge lies in refining the UI to this thing. Well, the secondary user’s interface is the thing that needs attention. My user is ready to roll.

Time is running short…tune in soon.

*** **PROTIP** ~burn the shit out of the copper contact tabs if you chop a RBG LED strip…the remnant rubber is a solder contact’s worst nightmare~ ***

Red Bull Project Update

Yesterday was fruitful. We are mostly done with the non-electronic portion of the build. I have a very tired jigsaw and a new-but-already-stress tested Dremel Multimax cooling off on the bench.

Oh yeah…and there was spray paint. A lot of spray paint…

small assistant
two at a time, eh

No Red Bulls for the small assistant. She’s good to go.

Heating up the soldering iron during the next nap. On to the next phase.

Oblig Red Bull Check-in

Thinkin’ of a master plan

nothin' but sweat inside my hand
nothin’ but sweat inside my hand

Timely song placement, Pandora…well played.

Thinkin’ thought. Profiled and ready to implement. I can see the finish line beyond a bunch of Dremel-ing and a bigger bunch of .cpp.

We’re close…stay tuned.

The Calm Before the Storm II

Materials, purchased.

busy lab is busy
b&w

I’m a bit further down the road as of this posting, and already in a tool crunch. It looks like Lowe’s is the winner of this round…I’ll be back there tomorrow on my lunch break. “You wore that apron yesterday Lowe’s bro! j/k! Throw ‘er on the tab!”

Anyhow, this goal for the weekend is to have the base infrastructure in a rudimentary complete status. I have a bunch of question marks at this point, but a sharpening picture of where Emma and I will end up with this thing. I need to get saws and edible stuff out of the picture, so I’m hoping to be in the hardware / software phase of this thing in a few days. The generally awesome people at Adafruit have a new Arduino heading towards the Rockies, and I have a bunch of LED strip-centric things to study before that happens…tons to do. Sensors to study…screws to drive…Fruit Loops to eat. We’re busy. Need some Red Bulls.

Stay tuned.

TurBull Encabulator Unboxing

Big news. Team swan tron made the cut for the 2013 Red Bull Creation competition. Sweet and I made an unboxing video to signal the official start of awesome junk…


–kit guts–

wangs

As the video demonstrates, the mood in global HQ is babblingly excited. Grabby and frantic, but excited.

The competition in these sorts of things is typically a lot tougher than the balsa bento box this kit shipped in. Maybe Emma and I can pull out an upset.