IoT Nalle dances to Twitter feed

Posted on 2016-04-16 by Tim Gremalm

An Internet of Things enabled teddy bear that dances at filtered Twitter statuses.

To move the teddy bears arms servos is used. It’s a pretty simple setup, some extenders for the arms that is going through the real arms of the teddy bear.
The servos is quite weak, so they bearly move the arms at all.

Mounting of the servos.

The electronic setups contains of a small cheap microprocessor called ESP8266. The ESP8266 have a small WiFI-antenna integrated in the breakout board and can hook up to any access point, or even create one.
I’m running the firmware NodeMCU , it’s a real time LUA interpreter. So the firmware is only programmed once on the flash. To write your own program you just transfer them over serial UART, and the firmware will save the script on flash.
The processor is running at 80MHz so it’s pretty fast.

I’m using Twitters API to fetch the latest post on a specific search term. The API gives me a detailed formated JSON file containing the time and date of the post, as well as the post.
The Twitter API is quite messy to work with, a lot of headers and authentication is required. The ESP would likly handle both the SSL and the big JSON format, but it will steal some CPU-time and it’s hard to work with. I made a PHP-proxy for the twitter feed, parsing the time and date and presenting it in unix timecode. The message of the post is stored as an MD5 hash sum.
On the IoT Nalle i keep track of the already “danced” Twitter posts and only dnaces to new posts.

Final assembly, a lot of hot glue and screws was used.

Interactive LED balancing board

Posted on 2016-04-13 by Tim Gremalm

A video posted by Tim Gremalm (@timgremalm) on Apr 12, 2016 at 6:45pm PDT

An interactive game were the visitors can build complex structure with help from an interactive LED balancer.
The installation was part at Vetenskapsfestivalen.

It’s a project by Stig Anton Nielsen read more about it in this post.

TeiSteadyBuilds from stig anton nielsen on Vimeo.

A video posted by Tim Gremalm (@timgremalm) on Feb 28, 2016 at 11:03am PST

The loadcells is build from 16 layers of conductive carbon packaging film. The recistance ranging from 500k to about 450 Ohm loaded at 8kg. Because it’s a so huge range the loadcells can be directly hooked up in a voltage divider, no amplifiers needed.
3 load cells us used to detect the direction and force of the balance. They are really sensitive to touch, small pressures from fingertips will be easily detected. A backside is that the film tends to be squashed so that it takes long time form the form and resistance to return.
The value from the 3 loadcells is arranged in 3 forces 120 degrees apart. The Forces is calculated into a resultant that is describing a thrust vector.
The thrust vector is indicated with a led strip of addressable WS2812 LED light. The stronger the force, more inbalanced, the greater the red marking will grow.

Att this Google Drive document I’ve collected som measuring data from the loadcells. There’s also some information of how the resultant is calculated.

LED lights in Iceland

Posted on 2016-03-11 by Tim Gremalm

LED pixel wall at Keflavik airport

At the airport a stumbled on some cool LED fixtures, it was some kind of addressable LED with an extraordinary diffuser made out of textile.
You can see the beautiful animation of a volcanic eruption lava on the right screen, and a sweet animation of aurora on the left.

Addressable LED facade at Harpa concert hall Reykjavík

They had lit up the whole facade of Reykjavíks concert hall Harpa.
It had small narrow LED strips in each window pane that covered the building completely, it looked beautiful at night.

Positional LED lights for Electric Longboard

Posted on 2015-12-10 by Tim Gremalm

I made some positional lights for my electric longboard to be able to be seen in traffic.

The rear red light have to be able to fold in when the board is placed on its butt.
A hinge was mounted, and a spring is holding the light tube up.

White electric tubing is used to protect a LED-stripe from dirt, it also diffuses the light.

The LED-stripes is powered by a buck converter, switching the voltage down from 25V to 12V.

CyckelLjudet – a bicycle equipped with a PA-system, LED-lights and solar panels

Posted on 2015-06-12 by Tim Gremalm

CyckelLjudet is a bicycle equipped with a PA-system, LED-lights and solar panels for taking your party with you.
It’s going to attend at the Westpride Parade in Göteborg 2015-06-14.

DIY Moving Head Spotlight PAR RGB-LED

Posted on 2014-01-14 by Tim Gremalm

There’s a small festival up in Uddevalla (Sweden) called Elinorspelen. It’s a non-profit festival with the goal to have fun and spread culture. Unfortunately the festival have a very low budget and can’t afford all the equipment that it needs, and lighting has especially been down-prioritized.

Two friends of mine, and I, decided to do something about it. We got together and started discuss what kind of stage light that would be possible to buy/make.

We all agreed on that moving head spotlights would probably the cheapest alternative that gave the most visual effect.

Research

We started out to search for cheap LED-diodes to make our own spotlight.
But after a day or so we quickly found out that to just build the a LED-array would cost as much as a commercial spotlight. For example this LED PAR 56 black 151 LEDs RGB 16W for 296SEK.
We soon gave up the idea of making our own LED spotlights.

But we found out that all the cheap LED-spotlights had a very wide beam angle, and we wanted a very narrow beam.

Making an RGB spotlight on a tight budget

We got back to the idea of making an spotlight ourselves. Picking out narrow 10-13° viewing angle LED’s from Ledz.com.

As I started to pick parts to the project, the list grew longer and the price were raised by big numbers.

I managed to find really cheap geared stepper motors from eBay for a really cheap price; 28BYJ-48 DC 12V, plus controller, for around 26SEK a piece. After some research it looked like that model i widely used in different DIY- and Arduino-projects.

After a few weeks of picking components forward and back I’ve come closer to a final budget on 450SEK per spotlight, and that excluding some material prices like polycarbonate. I suspect that the final price per unit will end up on 500SEK. That’s at least 3 times cheaper than any commercial light.

You can find the budget for the spotlights here (Google Drive).

Electronics

I’ve just a basic idea of what components the electrical design needs. Some micro-controller based up on the STM32 series should work well.
Some mosfets to drive the LED’s.
The LED’s should be connected in series to 12V, and have the same pinout as the popular LED-strips that are so widely available now. This should make the testing very easy.

Designing the chassis and mechanics

The designing process were making its way alongside with the budget, a design-change could radically change the budget.

I had a pretty basic idea how I wanted the final product to look like.

A LED-array soldered on to a PCB, the PCB should be mounted directly on an axis that were attached in a U-shaped arm.
The PCB would make the LED-array really lightweight and it should not be a problem for the geared stepper motor to move it.

I also thought of having the cabling layed inside the axis, so why not make the axis into a tube instead of a solid rod?

Moving the U-arm

But how would the U-arm move? I knew that a central shaft would be the focus in this problem. It should be able to move a pretty heavy weight, PCB + Stepper motor + alot of polycarbonate.

I also think that the moving head spotlight should be able to be mounted in several ways; placed on a flat surface shouldn’t be a problem. But be able to hang upside in a ceiling, or hanging from the side of a wall, that’s tough.
The center-axis mus be able to take on forces from many directions.
One thing was for sure, we needed alot of bearings.

With the bearings a shape took form, centered around the axis.

4 bearings are used on the center axis. 2 axial bearings to make it spin easy upside down and standing. And 2 bearings up and down to make the center-axis stiff and prevent it from leaning.

And around the bearings, the framework took place.

Somewhere here the pieces started to place them selves in the big puzzle, it was much easier to design now.

Around the framework we needed a casing to hold out dirt and to keep it pretty.
It’s hard to make a nice chassis by yourself, so I started to look around for a cheap case designed for another purpose.

I found this cheap water bawl for dogs for around 17SEK. It’s about 200mm in diameter and should house the mechanics and the framework nicely.

Designing in CAD

It’s one thing to have you design in your head and on paper, but it’s hard to grasp if it will fit or not. It’s here CAD-design comes into the picture.
I started to draw the different parts needed. As I draw the parts I could easily adjust lengths of parts to fit each other. Make puzzle-slots for the different pieces in the U-arm.

I try to make an easy design that could easily be milled out in our CNC-machine. The most parts are made so they could be cut out in X-Y-axis. I’m also trying to make as long and narrow pieces as possible, because long pieces are easier to fit narrowly on to a big polycarbonate-sheet.

The last part of the CAD-design was to put it all together, attach bearings to the shaft, build the U-arm.