I’m racing in an indoor micro FPV quadrotor (tiny whoop) race this weekend inside Nebraska Furniture Mart (a giant furniture store). The race is put on by our local Kansas City Multi-Rotor group. So, of course, I had to build some FastLED-powered race gates!
3/4" white PEX pipe is a pretty decent diffuser, especially with thin strips of white floral styrofoam on top and bottom of the LED strips to keep them centered in the pipes.
They can be built as cheap as ~$15 each. I used some Trinket Pro 5V I had laying around, but I plan to build more using Teensy LCs, Adafruit Metro Minis, cheap Nano clones, etc. Anything small, cheap, and 5V so I don’t need to add level-shifters. Two buttons are included, one to change brightness, the other to change patterns.
I built a few using perma-proto boards, but then designed PCB shields, of course. I threw together a few new patterns.
@Jason_Coon - Awesome!! I love the way you used the PEX pipe.
Thank you for sharing the white floral Styrofoam tip. I had used cotton balls in my recent post with PEX pipe but I like your way of using the foam much better.
Also, you might want to try out some of my chase functions which are based on some of your past code.
@marmil Thanks! There’s a tiny bit of my terrible flying at the end of this video. I need to practice more before this weekend. I’m much better with my 5" and 3" quads than my 65mm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqDBVKWO1fo
Just a thought, if you consider each of your gates as a rectangle, then you can create two pixel arrays that start at the bottom middle of the rectangle, i.e. your gate, and go right and left to the top middle of the rectangle. You could probably use those pixel arrays to run Fire2012withPalette on each array at the same time and have flaming gates.
@marmil they’re not synched at all, just all running the same sketch, same patterns, and all powered on at roughly the same time. Could definitely sync them over wifi using esp8266/esp32 instead of Teensy/Nano/Trinket.
NICE Job! I was curious why not use the UNO or build one with 328p. That way no level shifting needed. That pattern you are running should be no problem for an UNO I would think. I am in KC too. Where can I find more info on this drone racing thing. Thanks
@Jack_Keeney Thanks! I’m using Adafruit Pro Trinket, and cheap Nano clones that are both 328p. Both run at 5V, neither require a level shifter. I’m also thinking about trying the Metro Mini which has the 328p at 5v, and Teensy LC which is much faster and has one 5v GPIO.
I threw together a few new patterns.
