#halolight

I love the halo lights.  Whether you’re shooting a still, or video they provide a beautiful even light for close up work and I want one.  But I don’t just want a regular halo light: I want a programmable RGB one, with bluetooth and a smartphone app to control it which I can use to create visually interesting effects.

Of course, pretty much like everything I want, it doesn't exist, so I’m going to have to build it!

To achieve this, I’ll be using an arduino, a 24 RGB LED Ring, a serial bluetooth module, some power electronics and some lithium cells to power it.  As I mostly use a Nikon AW1, the halo light will be custom built to fit the cameras lenses.

The RGB LED Ring uses WS2812 LED’s which are really easy to work with and have some great libraries available to work with them on the Arduino.  I’m on pretty safe ground at this stage as we have used them a fair bit on the underwater jet pack so this should all be pretty straight forward.  (If you are a tinkerer yourself, you’ll probably know the WS2812 as the Adafruit Neopixel.)

The Arduino library I’m going to be using to drive the WS-2812′s is http://fastled.io/ it is super powerful and will let me do all kinds of cool things.  Most importantly it supports HSV and a rainbow colour palette, so I should be able to get some interesting colour effects on the go.

The halo light will have a full suite of colour correction options and once I get going and have a working prototype I’ll start to work on programming the different kinds of RGB effects that it might be able to achieve.  I won’t really know what works until I can build it and start to play with it on the camera.

Phase 1 of the project is to get the core arduino logic up and running and make the thing work.  Phase 2 will be to add the bluetooth interface and smartphone app.  Phase 3 will be to design and print the housing which will attach it to the camera.

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