19. Project Development¶
So I am writing this in early summer 2023, perhaps a bit late compared to the intended schedule. In my defense, this week didn’t exist in 2022!
As I have continued development on my final project, I can however turn this into an opportunity to reflect on the past year.
Completed tasks¶
I successfully completed my final project last spring. Yay!
This is not to say there weren’t setbacks, and a need to triage. Sound reactivity for instance was cut from the presentation version. Also the rest of my documentation did suffer, which is partly why I am writing this now!
Still, I was happy and proud with the end result, and have been using the product ever since.
Managmeent tools¶
For my final project I did not use a time management tool, other than perhaps my calendar. I think this is warranted, as the process was surprisingly linear. There weren’t for instance any ordered long lead time items to account for, as I made everything with on hand components.
For progress documentation I mostly wrote this site as I went along. It would perhaps have been useful to also document daily issues etc. in a diary/blog fashion. perhaps in the next project.
Lessons learned.¶
After using the first version for a summer, including a couple of bigger events I had a bunch of improvements I wanted to make.
Power supply¶
My original driver used three triple A batteries in series, providing an unregulated 4.5V output to both LEDs and microcontroller. This proved insufficient, as the batteries would run out after approximately a day of use, especially on higher brightnesses. Furthermore, as voltage dropped with use, the microcontroller would shut off before the LEDs, freezing them in the state they were. Turning off the LEDs would restore some voltage, but clearly not an ideal solution. Instead, a higher capacity, voltage regulated solution would better, ideally also rechargeable ones to reduce E-waste. Li-ion batteries immediately come to mind.
User interface.¶
The two pots and a button on the driver worked, but not too well. I realized that animation speed and brightness are not values one needs to fiddle with constantly, So having the pots mostly just led to accidental messing up of the values. A single button is also quite tedious to cycle modes with, and this would only become worse with more modes.
By moving to a wireless interface, I could solve many issues at once. Not only do I have much more options for commands, but the controller unit should become even smaller.
Processing power¶
When designing the original board, I didn’t quite realize how low power a 8-bit AVR controller really is. Don’t get me wrong, they’re fine for simple tasks, which is what my coding experience is limited to anyway.
But not other peoples.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel there are other much smarter people who have done it already. There are really nice LED visualisation libraries available, but they most often run quite advanced code. Also my I2S mic would really benefit from hardware support. Thus an upgraded microcontroller would be nice.
General durability.¶
After the summer it became evident that the strip is kinking at some points which are starting to fail. Furthermore, waterproofing would be useful. Some kind of redesign is needed to make the components even stronger.
Ledvest mk 3.2¶
To implement the lessons learned both the controller and strip need to be updated. Thus, a new design revision is in order. I’re written more on that progress here