Tag: Acrylic

NeoPixel Acrylic Lamp: A Few Lessons Learnt

Last month I wrote some notes about Chinese acrylic lamps, the same kind as I used successfully for my insulin reminder. As I said, I wanted to share the designs as I went along, and I do now have a public repository for what I have, although it has to be said that you shouldn’t trust it just yet: I have not managed to get this to properly turn it on. So instead, in the spirit of learning from others’ mistakes, let me show you my blooper reel.

Lesson #1: Don’t Trust The Library

A pictures of two SMT-manufactured Acrylic lamp boards side-by-side. These were unusable.

You may remember that in the previous post i showed the “sizing test”, which was a print of the board with no components on it, which I used to make sure that the LEDs and the screw holes would align correctly in the base. Since I had to take the measurement myself I was fairly worried I would get some of the measures wrong.

The size test was sent to print before I came to the conclusion that I actually wanted to use NeoPixel LEDs, instead of simple RGB LEDs, so it was printed to host “standard” 3535 common-anode LEDs. I then changed the design for a more sparse design that used the W2812B-Mini, which is a 3535 package (meaning it’s 3.5mm by 3.5mm in size), and is compatible with the NeoPixel libraries. This meant more capacitors (although modern versions of the W2812B don’t seem to require this) but less logic around connecting these up.

As you can see from the image above, I also added space on the side to solder headers to connect past the USB-to-UART and directly to the NeoPixel row. Which was probably my best choice ever. When the boards arrived, the first thing I did was connecting the NeoPixel control pins to try to turning them on and… I discovered that nothing worked.

The answer turned out to be that I trusted the Adafruit Eagle library too much: the pinout for the 3535 variants of the W2812B (the “mini”) has been added wrong since the beginning, and an issue existed since 2018. I sent a pull request to correct the pinout, but it looks like Adafruit is not really maintaining this repository anymore.

Because of the pinout mistake, there’s no way to access the NeoPixels on any of the ten boards I had printed in this batch, and I also missed one connection on the CP2104, which meant I couldn’t even use these as bulky USB-to-UART adapters as they are. But I can put this down as experience, and not worry too much about it, since it’s still a fairly cheap build by comparison with some of the components I’ve been playing with.

Lesson #2: Datasheets Can Still Lie To You

So I ordered another set of boards with a new revision: I replaced the 3535 version with the 5050 after triple checking that the pinout would be correct — while I did have a fixed part, I thought it would be better not to even suggest using a part that has a widespread broken pinout, and I did confirm I could fit the 5050 through the aperture by then. I also decided to move some components around to make the board a bit tighter and with a more recognizable shape.

The boards arrived, without the ESP32-WROOM module on them — that’s because it’s not in the list of parts that JLCPCB can provide, despite it being sold by their “sister company” LCSC. That’s alright because I procured myself the modules separately on AliExpress (before I figured out that ordering from LCSC is actually cheaper). And I started the testing in increasing order of satisfaction: can the NeoPixel be addressed? Yes! Can the CP2104 enumerate? Yes! Does it transmit/receive over serial? Yes! Does esptool recognize the newly soldered ESP32? Yes! Does it fit properly in the base with the module on, and have space to connect the USB plug? Yes! Can I flash MicroPython on it? Well…

This is where things got annoying and took me a while to straighten out. I could flash MicroPython on the ESP32 module. The programming worked fine, and I could verify the content of the flash, but I never got the REPL prompt back over serial. What gives?

Turns out I only read part of the datasheet for the module, and not the Wiki: there’s something that is not quite obvious otherwise, and that is that GPIO0 and GPIO2 are special, and shouldn’t be used for I/O. Instead, the two of them are used to select boot mode, and enter flashing. Which is why GPIO0 is usually tied to a “BOOT” switch on the ESP32 breakout boards.

How does esptool handle these usually? By convention it expects the RTS and DTR line of the serial adapter to be connected respectively to EN (reset) and GPIO0 (boot), together with “additional circuitry” to avoid keeping the board in reset mode if hardware flow control is enabled. Of course I didn’t know this when I sent these to manufacture, and I still am not sure what that additional circuitry looks like (there’s some circuitry on SparkFun Thing Plus, but it’s not quite clear if it’s the same as Espressif is talking about).

I have seen a few schematics for breadboard-compatible modules for ESP32, but I have not really found a good “best practices to include an ESP32 module into your design”, despite looking around for a while. I really hope at least documenting what can go wrong will help someone else in the future.

Next Steps

I have a third revision design that should address the mistakes I made, although at the time of writing this blog post I still need to find the “additional circuitry”, which I might just forego and remind myself that hardware flow control with ESP32 is probably a bad idea anyway — since the lines are used for other purposes.

I also made sure this time to add reset and boot buttons, although that turned out to be a bit more of a headache just to make sure they would fit with the base. The main issue of using “classic” top-actuated buttons is that putting them on the top of the board makes it hard to find them once mounted, and putting them on the bottom risk to get pressed once I fit back the bottom of the base in. I opted for side-actuated buttons, so that they are reachable when the board is mounted in the base, and marked on the bottom of the board, the same way as the connectors are.

I’m also wondering if I should at least provide the ability to solder in the “touch button” that is already present on the base, and maybe add a socket for connecting the IR decode to reuse the remote controls that I have plenty of, now. But that might all be going for over-engineering, who knows!

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be making an order of a new set of boards in the immediate future. I’ve already said this on Twitter, and it’ll deserve an eventual longer-form post, but it seems like we might be moving sooner, rather than later. And while JLCPCB and LCSC are very fast at shipping orders, I will be mostly trying not to make new orders of anything until we have a certainty of where we’ll be in a a few months. This is again a good time to put everything into a project box, and take it out when the situation feels a bit more stable.

Investigating Chinese Acrylic Lamps

A couple of months ago I built an insulin reminder light, roughly hacking around what I would call an acrylic lamp. The name being a reference to the transparent acrylic (or is it polycarbonate?) shape that you fit on top, and that lights up with the LEDs it’s resting on top. They are totally not a new thing, and even Techmoan looked at them three years ago. The relatively simple board inside looked fairly easy to hack around, and I thought it would make a good hack project to look more into them.

They are also not particularly expensive. You can go on AliExpress and get them for a few bucks each with so many different shape designs. There’s different “bases” to choose from, too — the one I hacked the Pikachu on was a fairly simple design with a translucent base, and no remote control, although the board clearly showed space for a TSOP-style infrared decoder. So I ended up ordering four different variants — although all of them without remotes because that part I didn’t particularly care for: one translucent base, one black base with no special features, one with two-colour shapes and LEDs, one one self-changing LEDs with mains power only.

While waiting for those to turn up, I also found a decent deal on Amazon on four bases without the acrylic shapes on them for about £6 each. I took a punt and ordered them, which turned out to be a better deal than expected.

These bases appear to use the same board design, and the same remote control (although they shipped four remotes, too!), and you can see an image of it on the right. This is pretty much the same logic on the board as the one I hacked for my insulin reminder, although it has slightly different LEDs, which are not common anode in the package, but are still wired in a common-anode configuration.

For both the boards, the schema above is as good a reversing as I managed on my own. I did it on the white board, so there might be some differences in the older green one, particularly in the number of capacitors, but all of that is not important for what I’m getting to right now. I shortened the array to just four LEDs to show, but this goes on for all of the others too. The chip is definitely not a Microchip one, but it fits the pinout, so I kept that one, similarly to what I did for the fake candle. Although in this case there’s no crystal on the board, which suggests this is a different chip.

I kind of expected that all the remaining boards would be variation on the same idea, except for the multi-color one, but I was surprised to figure out that only two of them shared the same board design (but took different approaches as to how to connect the IR decoder — oh yeah, I didn’t select any of the remote-controlled lamps, but two of them came with IR decoderes anyway!)

The first difference is due to the base itself: there’s at least two types of board that relate to where the opening for the microUSB port is in relation to the LEDs: either D-shaped (connector inline with the LEDs) or T shaped (connector perpendicular to the LEDs). Another difference is in the placement of the IR decoder: on most of the bases, it’s at 90° from the plug, but in at least one of them it’s direct opposite.

Speaking of bases, the one that was the most different was the two-colours base: it’s quite smaller in size, and round with a smooth finish, and the board was proper D shaped and… different. While the LEDs were still common-anode and appeared wired together, each appears to have its own paired resistor (or two!), and the board itself is double-sided! That was a surprise! It also is changing the basic design quite a bit more than I expected, including only having one Zener, and powering up the microcontroller directly over 4.5V instead of using a 3V regulator.

It also lacks the transistor configuration that you’d find on the other models, which shouldn’t surprise, given how it needs to drive more than the usual three channels. Which actually had me wonder: how does it drive two sets of RGB LEDs with an 8-pin microcontroller? Theoretically, if you don’t have any inputs at all, you could do it: VDD and VSS take two pins, each set of LEDs take three pins for the three colour channels. But this board is designed to take an IR decoder for a remote control, which is an input, and it comes with a “button” (or rather, a piece of metal you can ground with your finger), which is another input. That means you only have four lines you can toggle!

At first I thought that the answer was to be found on the other six-pin chip on the lift, but turns out that’s not the case. That one is marked 8223LC and that appears to correspond to a “touch controller” Shouding SD8223L and is related to the metal circlet that all of these bases use as input.

Instead, the answer became apparent when using the multimeter in continuity mode: since it provides a tiny bit of current, you can turn on LEDs by pointing them between anode and cathode of the diode. Since the RGB cathode on the single LED package are already marked on the board, that’s also not difficult to do, and while doing that I found their trick: the Blue cathods are common to all 10 LEDs, they are not separate for outer and inner groups, and more interestingly the Green cathodes are shorted to the anodes for the inner four LEDs — that means that only the outer LEDs have the full spectrum of colours available, and the only colour combination that make the two groups independent is Green/Red.

So why am I this interested in these particular lamps? Well, they seem to be a pretty decent candidate to do some “labor of love” hack – as bigclive would call it – with making them “Internet of Things” enabled: there’s enough space to fit an ESP32 inside, and with the right stuff you should be able to create a lamp that is ESPHome compatible — or run MicroPython on it, either to reimplement the insulin reminder logic, or something else entirely!

A size test print of my custom designed PCB.

Indeed, after taking a few measurement, I decided to try my hand at designing a replacement board that fits the most bases I have: a D-shaped board, with the inline microUSB, has just enough space to put an ESP32 module on it, while keeping the components on the same side of the board like in the original models. And while the ESP32 would have enough output lines to control at least the two group of LEDs without cheating, it wouldn’t have enough to address normal RGB LEDs individually… but that doesn’t need to stop a labor of love hack (or an art project): Adafruit NeoPixel are pretty much the same shape and size, and while they are a bit more expensive than the regular RGB LEDs they can be individually addressed easily.

Once I have working designs and code, I’ll be sharing, particularly in the hopes that others can improve on them. I have zero designing skills when it comes to graphics or 3D designing, but if I could, I would probably get to design my own base as well as the board: with the exception of the translucent ones, the bases are otherwise some very bland black cylinders, and they waste most of the space to allow 3×AAA batteries (which I don’t think would last for any amount of time). Instead, a 3D printed base, with hooks to hold it onto a wall (or a door) and a microUSB-charged rechargeable battery, would be a lovely replacement for the original ones. And if we have open design for the board, there’s pretty much no need to order and hope for a compatible base to arrive.