Mood Rock
I was in an art store and came across a neat looking alabaster rock.
And for some reason, I thought it would be cool to stick some lights in it, which started yet another project. I started out by building a circuit on the cheap using some components I had lying around.
I thought it would be cool to control the color from the PC, so I decided to check out the AVR-USB project. The cool thing about AVR-USB is that it handles the USB protocol in firmware alone and doesn’t require any additional ICs. I had a number of hickups – the biggest one being that as soon as a USB packet was received, the SPI on the AVR would stop working. After many hours of not being able to figure out the culprit, I resorted to bit-bang SPI and everything started working. The lights are shiftbrites from macetech. The cable is an ISP programming interface for the AVR. Component count is fairly low – a crystal, a bypass cap, a supply cap, two USB termination resistors and a pullup resistor.
I used a masonry bit to drill a lot of holes in the bottom of the rock, then used a hammer and chisel to finish enlarging the space. The board just barley fits in there.
And the effects were pretty cool..
The communication is via a modified hidtool.c application (an example shipped with AVR-USB) which transmits a 4 byte payload which is then shifted onto the LEDs. For completeness, I wrote a small application in perl to act as a webserver and handle requests – forwarding valid requests to the hidtool application. And I also put together a nice color picker front end which uses AJAX to update the color on the fly. So as you move the color picker, the rock changes color accordingly. I put together a video of everything working together here :
There is a small amount of lag, which is to be expected — the chain of operations is…
- open web app, and pick a color
- color picker uses AJAX to send requests to a server running on my desktop
- server forks hidtool.exe with the color arguments
- hidtool then connects to the USB device (rock) and transmits the new color strings.
This chain of events is repeated every time the color changes – this happens as the cursor is being moved around thus it can generate quite a few requests. To improve throughput, I would need to merge the C app into the perl app, or visa-vera.
I’ve gone ahead and put the application online here so go ahead and set your mood color which will be displayed on my rock.
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Resources
- Web Application – change the AXAJ target by modifying js/layout.js
- Firmware & Command Line Tool
- Perl WebServer
- Schematic