Monday, November 4, 2013

Switching out LED strips

There is a recent change in the LED strips that we will be supplying with the EFeel_Basic unit. Originally we had plans to supply a one (1) meter long RGB addressable LED strip like these ones :https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/11272





These LED strips have been replaced with a newer model. We are currently looking into and testing the new models. So we will let everyone knows how that goes.




Tuesday, October 29, 2013

AGC (Auto Gain Controlled) Microphone


The idea of having an AGC mic came from us trying to think of ways people would use EFeel products. One of the questions we were faced with was “what if someone just wants to do something that looks awesome but doesn’t have the knowledge or time to create a sequence on Vixen?” From that we thought that our product should respond to the environment so the users don’t have to do anything and it would still look really cool.


AGC stands for “Auto Gain Controlled” which means it will adjust the volume of the mic without any user input needed. For example when using a camera to record in a club and playing back the footage the sound is horrible because it was so loud that mic was clipping. We also see this happens with those shirts that have a light up picture on them that respond to sound. When it’s too quiet it doesn’t work and when it is too loud it just stays on all the time. To make sure the microphone feature works in almost all environment it will adjust its gain (volume) based on the environment. This way the user can just show up to parties or any other events and the lights will respond to the surrounding sounds without any adjustment needed by the user.


So you may ask how is our progress on our cool AGC mic feature…
I can say it is on the next prototype that is going to be shipped out very soon. Other than that we are crossing our fingers.



Monday, October 28, 2013

Creating an EFeel outfit



Having bought tickets to a Halloween music festival I decided this would be a great time to test out our EFeel Pro model. So my friends Don Heer and Brandi Coker help me make some costumes out of EL wires that would be controled with our EFeel Pro. So here we go:

(get our EFeel here http://kck.st/1i93B51)


Costume 1:
This one is the first one that was made. The idea of was very simple and came from the logo I made. For our first prototype we had sewed all the EL wires on and that took a very long time so this time I tired hot gluing the EL wires to a shirt to see if it would work. Hot gluing turned out to be much faster and didn’t damage the EL wires, but it was a lot messier. The hot glue held pretty well and nothing came apart. Another issue was making sharp corners with EL wires for the circuit board trace design. So in-order to make the sharp corners I made a loop with the EL wires and covered the loop up with black electrical tape. The looping ended up not looking that great so next time I will probably loop the EL wires through the shirt or just bend the wires as tight as I can and use a lot of hot glue to keep there.






Costume 2:
This one was made by Don Heer and will be for Oregon State University. The costume is a white lab coat with about 50 feet of orange EL wires. The OSU part is done by hot gluing orange EL wires to a piece of cardboard and attaching the cardboard on the inside of the lab coat. the orange heart and glasses are done the same way, organe EL wire is glued on.





Costume 3:

This is Brandi Coker’s costume. It is also a lab coat and uses the same ideas as the orange lab coat design. EL wire is glued and ran through the lab coat to make the aperture logo on the back along with the heart, glasses, and turret figure in the front. There was a total of 30 feet of EL wires.



Friday, October 25, 2013

Making a Single Channel Driver

Before we jump into today's post, be warned: the picture quality is lacking! I only had the camera on my phone available and it's not a fancy phone... Anyway, onto the post!

I attempted to make a driver/inverter for a strand of EL Wire today. We've been talking about making one ourselves to attempt to make it smaller than what we have and be able to integrate it into our boards. So, this was just a test run to see if it's at all possible. I based it off of a schematic found in an article on Make:. The basics of what this circuit is supposed to do is that it takes a steady signal (always positive) and creates and alternating signal (switches between positive and negative) while increasing the voltage from input to output. It uses a timer to create the alternating signal (on/off) and then uses a step up transformer to create the higher voltage on the output. I had a limited amount and types of parts available for me to use, so I had to be a little creative. I took an old piece of protoboard to use and mapped out on my engineering paper where I wanted to lay out my parts and traces.
It's not the easiest to read, but you can kinda tell what I was thinking. From there I started soldering parts onto the protoboard and just going for it.
The picture shows that I started my board working from one side to the other. This is mainly because the parts that the whole thing is based around were on this side of the board. The blue box is a potentiometer which is used to control the frequency that the timer outputs. The black rectangle with the 8 silver legs is the timer. The black rectangle with the silver edge on the left is a transistor. The yellow ovals are capacitors and the light blue things are resistors. The reason for having multiples of the capacitors and resistors was because I didn't have the values for those that were on the schematic.A little improvising never hurts... Well, almost never!
From there, I continued putting in parts and creating "traces". The following picture is of the underside of the protoboard. This was my first time creating a full circuit on protoboard like this, and creating the traces was harder than I expected!
I had finished the board at this point and decided to try it out using a power supply and measuring the output with an oscilloscope. I got everything hooked up and to the settings I wanted. I then turn the power supply output on... and nothing happens. There is no output! Nothing is happening on the oscilloscope screen. I check all my connections and try again. Still, nothing!
One thing I did realize when checking over everything is that the transistor I was using was not quite what I needed. I knew that I wasn't using the same one listed in the schematic, but I thought it had the same qualities. The article mentioned something about a TIP120 Darlington transistor, but I didn't think much of it. I had never heard of a Darlington transistor before. So, when I was checking back over my finished work, I looked more into the Darlington transistor. I realize now that it's not the same as the TIP29 that I using. I'm not saying the transistor is the only reason why this didn't work. I'm sure there are other things that were not quite correct with my circuit.
So, no cool lights to show or pretty pictures to awe at. Just a circuit that doesn't work. This was a good learning experience for me. I learned about Darlington transistors, how to solder "traces" on protoboard, and that the correct parts would probably help in assembling a circuit.


Wednesday, October 23, 2013

First Production Run is in Full Swing


The final three boards to fulfill Utah Ballroom Dance's order have just made it in from our local PCB fab in Portland, Oregon. OSH Park has, once again, done a brilliant job. Plus we got a sticker! The order for the parts needed to populate the boards is in with DigiKey and we should be able to get these completed and ready for pick up by November. We're really looking forward to the production they put on with these and hope to get to at least one of their performances once the show is on (they're shows aren't only in Utah, btw).

Monday, October 21, 2013

T-shirt design

With the start of our Kickstarter we are all frantically working to get everything as close to perfect as we can so that we can deliver a polished product. Along with designing our lighting controllers we have designed some t-shirts as one of the perks for helping us out. Below is a render of the t-shirt design. It is a simplistic design that we hope people would like. Let us know what you think.


Wednesday, October 9, 2013

One LED Strip potential use

We're so close to going live with the Kickstarter! A few last minute items and we'll be able to set the Kickstarter site live. Stick with us and we'll let you know when!

One thing we want to show you are the potential uses for our boards. One thing we tested while doing early development is using individually addressable RGB LED strips. What that means is each LED on a strip can be a different color. There are many LED strips out there that only have all the LEDs one color at at a time, which can still be used with our boards, but we wanted to test the ease of use of the individually addressable LED strips.

The effects that can be created with individually addressable RGB LED strips is also very exciting. There are so many color choices available to play with and the patterns are a lot of fun. It was a good experience to play with the pretty colors to make something exciting! I will admit that once the strip had the color pattern desired, a lot of time was spent just looking at the lights change colors.

Driver and Transmitter Boards with RGB LED strip
The pattern the strip is showing, is the Red-Green-Blue Spectrum. It was designed to flow the colors through the strip. It looked like a rainbow shifting and wrapping around the ends. There are some video segments of it actually shifting through the colors in our Kickstarter video, so make sure to check that out once we go live to see the full effect!

So, this is one potential use for our project. You could have a light up belt, headband, table lighting, etc. using the LED strips. If you ever have any questions for us (about anything!) please leave a comment here on our blog or write on our Facebook page. We'd love to get some feedback and know what our supporters are interested in hearing from us!