Introduction

Hello, I am sure some of you might have heard we are starting a Kickstarter but are not sure what it is about. First, I would like to say thanks for all the support even though you have no clue what it is. =)

Lets just jump right into the details. We (Brian Benavidez, Chelsea Collette, and Tuan Truong) are creating a wireless lighting controller and we plan to push it to Kickstarter. Our project, Electric Feel, allows real-time wireless control of Electroluminescent (EL) Wire and LED Strips. Applications for our projects include wearable lights, art performances, and all forms of decoration. Our goal is to create a flexible and easy to use lighting controller. We have spent a lot of time creating something that is easy for the average consumer to use but has a lot of potential. We are excited to see what people can create with our project. We are currently in the process of getting everything together for our Kickstarter but we plan to keep updating everyone as we progress.

Quiet Start

I know we started off loud and excited about Electric Feel and that it has been a bit quiet for the last few days, but we've been busy getting ready to launch! Most of what we're doing right now isn't the most exciting, but as we get going, it should look better and better. We hope you're as excited as we are to get this underway.

This week we worked on some filming for our video. Thankfully it was not a live, one and done shoot! The three of us are not the most natural in front of the camera. However, we had some laughs and got enough material to make an awesome, informative video. Following are just a couple pictures from our filming session.

 Tuan setting up one of the camera's we were using to film.

 Brian is taking down the white backdrop because we thought the brown one had a bit more life

Also this week, we are working on making our Kickstarter page look awesome and hopefully within the next couple days we can provide you a preview link to get a better look of what it's all about. We're still finishing our description and putting together the video, but it should be great!

We appreciate all of your support this early in the process! We hope that our support group keeps growing through our friends and friends of friends and everybody else that is willing to support what we're doing. Thank you!

Get Caught Up

So a lot of work has gone into this project this summer, here's the run down to this day:

Jesse from the Utah Ballroom Dance Company approached Oregon State University's Electrical Engineering Department to have some wirelessly controlled, light up dance suits. The interns at TekBots were given the task of researching and developing a system that can wirelessly control 6 suits with 8 channels of Electroluminescent Wire each.

We quickly distributed tasks to each of the interns (Tuan Truong, Chelsea Collette, and Brian Benavidez). The system logically broke down into three sections: the transmitter, the receiver, and the driver, the latter two being the devices physically attached to each dancer. Chelsea took on the driver, Brian took on the receiver, and Tuan took on the transmitter. Here is rev 0 of the boards:

The first boards worked for the most part but there was clearly a new revision in our future. The boards were larger than necessary (check out all that blank green space!) and would cost too much to produce them in quantity. The receiver needed a lot of additional work, extra hardware and unused microcontroller pinouts needed to go, and the power distribution needed to be addressed. This board could take in 12v which would be passed directly to the inverters needed to drive the wire at 100V, 2kHz, then regulate the 12v down to 3.3v to power the microcontroller. This was easy enough but we were wasting power dropping 12v to 3.3v using a linear voltage regulator. The solution here was to use a less power-hungry switching regulator to drop the 12v down to 5v, then use the linear regulator for the additional drop from 5v to 3.3v. The benefit here was that we could add a couple pinouts from the microcontroller to drive addressable LED strips like these:

Now we could offer Utah Dance the option of using LEDs in addition to EL wire. Awesome!

So we went to work on the second revision, adding some hefty power hardware and combining the receiver and driver into one, more compact board. The result:

Here is the board with all of the wires connected and ready to go (yeah, it's a lot). So we 3D printed a case and crimped on some JST connectors to try and clean everything up.

 Below is the final board inside the case which we were able to easily attach to a suit that Utah Dance put together for us.








That pretty much sums up the progress so far. Obviously there were many more small decisions made and hardware/software development which will come to light in future posts, but for the sake of length, we'll leave it at that for now.