#openhardware

Festival of Lights… A 'USB Stick' Sparkle Motion WLED driver ✨💡🔌🌟

To wrap up this year, we're doing 8 days (maybe!) of light-filled designs. We started with the Sparkle Motion Mini

which can drive thousands of shimmering RGB LEDs. Next, we were going through some of our NeoPixel samples today and found some "LED Christmas light kit" with star LEDs, its basically these stars

with a little USB plug that has IR, a crummy mic, a tactile switch to cycle modes manually, and a tiny microcontroller that turns the LED selections to different patterns - kinda like this:

The idea is cute - but the implementation could be improved with a lil sparkle motion

! we made a PCB that would fit into the same plastic enclosure but with an ESP32 instead. it's got an IR receiver, ICS-43434 I2S digital microphone

https://www.digikey.com/short/mmv3tthz

Episode 1: Irony in the wasteland

Another hot sweaty day as Slick and I hobble through the waste lands in search of electronics to trade for food. As I hobble along, I think that you have to smile at the irony of life.  My rich parents were lost in a freak bird accident in our flying car. I was lucky as the accident only left me short one leg. Lucky – sort of. That accident not only stripped me of my family, but it changed my whole way of life. When I was injured I was thrown out of Metro with the trash into the wastelands.

Now 3 years later, I scavenge to survive with my best friend -a fox bird- I call Slick. Slick kept me alive in this dump by finding food in Metro’s waste before I figured out how to live in the wasteland. Believe it or  not, I am not alone. Metro has many rejects or as they say “jects” scattered all over the sprawling wasteland. 

I grew up rich and comfortable. My parents had both been ruling elites in Metro that backed a zero tolerance for the weak and disabled. Now I find myself with the other jects searching through Metro’s trash to survive.

My name is Aditi, which my dad said came from an ancient tongue that meant unimpaired. Pretty funny right for a girl with only one leg? Worse, or perhaps funnier, my missing foot still itches!

System76 is releasing a new open-source computer, available for preorder next month. In the coming weeks, before the finalized hardware is announced, a four-part animation will be released weekly, with design updates hidden within a game portion of the story.

The animated videos follow the journey of two characters: Zoe, the Pop!_OS installer bot for System76 computers, and Tenzen, an engineer. Tenzen travels through a dark corner of the universe, called the Thelio System, to find the origins of Zoe’s damage in order to repair her. 

An interactive game portion for each chapter allows players to explore unique settings in order to guide Tenzen on his journey. These settings contain easter eggs for players to unlock secrets pertaining to the design of the new computer.

The story itself contains different worlds, each representing an antithesis to open source ideals. These themes are utilized to draw attention to the importance of open source in the evolution of technology. The parallel drawn between open source and the Thelio computer also helps System76 celebrate its milestone as the company transitions to manufacturing its own open hardware. CEO Carl Richell has been striving to achieve this goal since the company’s inception in 2005, and is eager to bring the new hardware to customers and open source fans alike.

Newxie brings the joy of nixies without the 170V power supply 💡🕰️✨

If there's one thing that melts our hearts, it's a nixie clock - we built one 20 years ago!

but nixies are hard to find now that we don't hit up the MIT swapfest at 7am anymore

well we saw this funky faux nixie clock

http://www.unitedcreation.co/marvel-tubes/

and realized they're just using the same 1.14" TFTs we stock already

mini Sparkle Motion prototype - a tiny, fully-featured WLED board ✨🔌📏💡🌈

We're doing a lot of serious testing with our WLED mega-board, code-name Sparkle Motion .

While doing some holiday lighting projects, we also wanted something slim enough to slip into any design. It still uses an ESP32 for the best support, with USB-serial programming, 5A fuse, 5V level shifting + 100 ohm series resistors for pixel drivers, user/reset buttons, a user LED and onboard neopixel, JST SH analog/digital connector, QT I2C connector, 4 GPIO plus power/ground breakouts, and USB type C power/data input.

However, this version is made simpler and less expensive by dropping the DC jack and USB PD support: it's only for 5V strips if you want to power them directly (you could still drive 12V or 24V pixels, but you'll need separate power for them). Instead of a full set of terminal blocks for 3 signals, we only have two outputs, and they have to share the power and ground pins. It could also be used for a single two-pin dotstar LED setup. We kept the built-in I2S mic but dropped the on-board IR sensor - if you want an IR sensor, you'll be able to plug it into the JST SH port with a simple cable or solder it into the breakout pads.

Leftovers & layout - WLED board revision A completed!

Sunday night, Babyada went to bed early, so we finished the capture and layout of our WLED board. Thanks to all the suggestions, we were able to implement quite a few!

For power, use USB C PD with switch-select or DC up to 24V; they are diode-OR'd together with PMEG3050

https://www.digikey.com/short/zv22b0pq

into a massive 5A 24V fuse

https://www.digikey.com/short/43qwwtwm

For the 5V regulator, we picked NCP718ASN500T1G

https://www.digikey.com/short/bb9ncc0n

- it's linear, but we don't need a lot of current at 5V. For 3.3V, we went with our trusty TPS54202

https://www.digikey.com/short/c1wnnf94

Upon request, we kept the ICS-43434 I2S microphone

https://www.digikey.com/short/28zwrrhz

and added an IR 38KHz receiver. For external connectivity, there's an ADC/DAC/GPIO #27 breakout on a JST SH 3-pin and I2C on a StemmaQT/Qwiic 4-pin.

We also added a 2x3 breakout header with 3V, GND, and 3 more GPIO so you could connect an external microphone, IR receiver, buttons, or rotary encoder. The terminal blocks have three 5V level-shifted outputs with 100 ohm in-line resistors and power/ground pairs for each. If you need just one more LED strand, the fourth 5V signal is on the 2x3 block.

Rounding out the design are four mounting holes, a reset button, GPIO #0 user button, GPIO LED, and an individual NeoPixel, which could be useful for testing. It's still pretty small, 2" x 1.3". With an ESP32-Mini module, we can pick a PCB or wFL antenna port, and it's an easy swap to make it use an ESP32-Pico, which has 2MB PSRAM.