Return of the Christmas Tree Project (ch 5): More LEDs!

It's been two years since I started my Christmas tree project. Last year, I didn't work on the project at all, but this year, we're back in full force. And I bought more led lights to put in my tree. In fact, we'll be doing five times as many LEDs as before!

Because it had been so long and because I had moved since I worked on it last, the first thing was to get the project up and running again. And the first thing to work on was my Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, the sd card in the Pi that I was using before had gotten corrupted.

I spent quite a bit of time looking for my card reader, but all it did was confirm that the sd card did not work at all. Luckily having found the card reader also made it very easy to get a new sd card ready. The next thing was to find the code. It wasn't on my desktop, so it had to be on my private git server. However, that server failed a while ago, so I had to track down the storage I used in that server. This took some effort, but I found it eventually. And then it turned out that the code wasn't on there either...

The code had apparently only been on the sd card, so I would have to write it again. The amount and complexity of the code was such that that was feasible enough, but it was still a bummer. I took a look at the code from the project that had been the inspiration for this one to look at what libraries had been used. Looking at that repository made me remember that I had shared my own code with the world as well. And that was where the code was! You see, I only kept my private projects on my private git server. My public projects were all on GitHub. And indeed, the lost code was right there on GitHub.

It seems that I did have some code that was only on the sd card. In particular, I seem to be missing the three dimensional effects that I wrote. One was a rainbow effect and that should be easy enough to recreate, especially because the one effect that I still have does have much of the general structure I'd want to use. The other effect was an effect that never really worked that well, and isn't really that much of a loss.

With the pi running again and the code being back in my possession, I could get to working on the thing again. I was unsure if I would be able to run all the LEDs from one power source, so that was the first thing to test. I connected all my new LEDs and set them to white light at 25% brightness.

Several interpretations of white...

To be fair, all lights turned on and all of them being white is the worst case. But, 25% brightness is roughly 75% below the worst case. And the results were pretty bad. However, this looked like the power adapter was handling it just fine. Instead, it looked like voltage drop to me, which is not related to the adapter but to the lights and the wires between them.

So, I rigged up a quick test and saw that indeed, things looked a lot better if I connected the power source to each string of lights separately, even if it was still the same single adapter. The light strings do have extra wires that help you do this, but the bare wires aren't too easy to use. So, I decided to take some of my Dupont cables, cut them in half and splice the halves onto those wires to make them much easier to use. Using these tools and this skill set was a lot of fun, which surprised me because I had forgotten how much I liked doing this.

A bit of solder

Some tape

And some more tape

I added a breadboard to map from one input coming from my micro-usb breakout boar to multiple wires going to the different strings. This actually made for a surprisingly good setup.

Now, that's what I'd call white

I also worked a bit on my code. I took some of my old one-dimensional code and cleaned it up. I also wrote a simple rainbow effect. It's not as good as an effect that includes a tree and coordinates of the LEDs, of course, but it's still quite nice. And I did use some of the lessons I remembered from making the rainbow effect for in the tree two years ago.

The next step will be to try to cram all these LEDs into my small tree. (I'm at half the number of LEDs Matt Parker used, but my tree is also a lot smaller.) And then I can start using the most essential and complex code I wrote last year to map all the LEDs. I'm happy I won't have to rewrite that code!