Roku physical – proof of concept
Roku has officially escaped the bounds of the computer screen! Here is one cell of Roku working on it’s own. This proves that I can make these (I’ve made 2 cells so far), that the lighting looks awesome and the motion is very controllable. The button pressing action is added, but not to my satisfaction. I’m using the guts from old keyboards to act as the buttons, which is almost working. Re-using the electrical components of the keyboards proved to be really hard; I believe my next attempt will be with reed switches.
So this is what I have before my Thanksgiving vacation. When I return it will be time to hit the ground running and get all of them made. In addition to getting button-pressing working, I also need to be able to control more than 1 at a time… This is the real challenge. I’m completely new to Arduino and hardware in general, so I don’t know my constraints or what’s possible. I’ve heard rumor that controlling upwards of 20 servos from one Arduino isn’t hard to do as long as I’m okay with sacrificing some accuracy. I can deal with that. It looks like I’ll need a heafty power supply in addition to figuring out where that fits into the whole puzzle.
Over the break I’ll be finalizing the cell pattern, and material choices. Translating these models into laser-cut templates and ordering 24 of everything. If everything goes to plan without too much trouble I’ll be showing rapid Roku process and working shots of Roku in action by the New Year.
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10:49 am
Hey Lee,
That’s pretty sweet looking. Have you thought about running a few synchronized Arduino in parallel instead of trying to control ~20 units from a single board?
12:28 pm
Yes definitely. I’m thinking of a crazy scheme to have 2 arduino’s controlling 12 servos each, 1 arduino controlling all of the LEDs and 1 arduino doing all the button input and game logic all talking on the serial line.
I’m having hard times with getting even more than 1 servo to work at a time with the Arduino, I’m guessing I’m pulling more current than I have available, but I’m not totally sure about how to wire up external power supplies…
More to learn, I suppose.
4:05 am
I have an idea for your problem. the TLC5940NT chips for about $4 each from digikey. These are 16 channel LED drivers with 4096 shades of PWM gray on each. The arduino can drive them with just a couple digital lines and a clock. You can daisy chain them if you need more than one, so you won’t take more arduino lines. There is nifty logic in there for calibrating your LEDs, but I won’t have the voltage to program that in the circuit. also, because they are PWM, they will also control servos quite nicely. Let me know it this helps :-/