Arduino-Based, High Powered LED Lighting Over Wi-Fi

Gibbs-Duhem writes "This awesome video was produced by some MIT engineers recently. They've started a fully open-source, open-hardware high power LED lighting project that they designed to be modular enough to control with the Arduino (or any other control system). Using their open-source firmware, you can set up the Arduino to connect to Wi-Fi and receive Open Sound Control packets. Then, they went further and released open-source software for PureData and Python to do music analysis and make the lights flash brilliantly in time with the music! A full Instructable was also posted in addition to the existing documentation for design and assembly on their website."

Arduino again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't people write regular C code anymore these days? When you get down to it, Arduino is just software added to a regular Atmel AVRs.

Re:So .... ?

[BisexualPuppy]

Blinking some LEDs doesn't require 8Mhz. Nor 4Mhz. Actually, it requires something like blinking_time*2Hz. Performances are *not* a problem here. Why do you think so many people program in Java or .NET stuff ? Because nowadays it's good enough, and it saves days, weeks, months, or years worth of salaries. Hardware is cheap, brain is expensive. My question is : Why the hell do you want them to code in C (or assembly, if I follow your path) to blink some LEDs ?? (And remember that Arduino language is nothing else that preprocessed C, it is in fact compiled with avr-gcc).
(Ho, and I code in assembly at least once a week, I code embedded C for a living, so I'm hardly saying that because I don't like low level stuff. Coding for performance in this kind of project is just not relevant)

$800 ?!

[Speare]

Okay, I've done some Arduino stuff myself, and am familiar with the pricing on typical custom PCBs from Sparkfun. So I checked out the Saiko5 product page.

I mentally added up the custom wifi shield, the custom LED driver board, the LEDs, the Arduino itself, and thought damn, I bet they're gonna offer this for nearly a hundred bucks. Add on a rubber duck antenna, some wall wart or LIPO for power, and a basic case, and that's more like $150. Then I see the photos of heavy duty bomb-proof cases which appear to be machine-bent-then-anodized aluminum plate. Even 2mm plate is overkill and this looks a lot thicker. That's silly thick and heavy, even for stage pyrotechnics units, and it's gonna cost. There's no way I'd be interested in $200 for such a device, especially since they'd work best in grid/swarm configurations. The altogether price they offered was four times that, at $800. Even factoring for (1) niche market, (2) assembly disincentive [prefer DIY assembly], and (3) low count factory runs, this price is out of all sensibility.

Re:So .... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's blinking and there's blinking. If you are doing any processing besides mere on/off, and are multiplexing a chain of 32+ individually PWM'd addressable LEDs, you do need a few MHz. I know because I coded and built one in avr assembly for my Christmas tree. I suppose I could have have used Java on some much beefier hardware, but fuck that.

Re:LEDs!

[Anonymous Coward]

the power electronics involved here aren't trivial. it was designed from scratch. 800 lumens is burn-your-eyes-out bright, not some piddly 5mm LED-blinker project you find on Instructables.

New dog, old tricks

[Sarten-X]

That's it? When I read "high powered", I was expecting switching 500-amp supplies to banks of flood lights. I wasn't expecting... this.

This is the same stuff that hobbyists [doityourse...istmas.com] and others [lightorama.com] have been doing for years. Their lights also perform outdoors, in occasional high winds, at extreme temperatures. The only thing that MIGHT be interesting here is the music analysis program, if it's capable of picking up actual musical qualities, rather than just levels of noise.