I already introduced my quarantine art project, and as I promised here comes the second blog post on the topic, just to keep my own running notes around.

First of all, I decided to at least (partially) follow the advice from Adam Savage in his biography, about making lists and planning carefully. Indeed, I decided to write on paper as much running notes as I could and I could make sense, particularly since, as I said in the previous post, I’m not really at ease with electronics and I’m just lost at most of the things that are needed for this project, truth be told. So shout out to my friend Srdjan for helping me keep an eye on the things that are required!

One of the things I clearly needed to solve was the access point for the wires themselves. The cable I have at home (without me going and buying more) is “equipment wire” (I got this a couple of years back because it’s single-core and made my protyping on the breadboard easier), and it is 0.6mm in diameter. I’m sure I can probably look for thinner wire, like wire-wrapping wire, and it’ll be perfectly fine to run 5V/50mA. But unless I deem it’s going to be impossible to keep hidden the wire I already have, I don’t think I’ll be buying more wire just yet.

Because of the nature of the model, the easiest way to modify the set without it being too noticeable it’s on the sides — Birch Books is designed to fit together with other Creator kits, and can be connected together through the base. Indeed, the kit itself is composed of two buildings that are connected at the base, and otherwise perfectly independent. This would be a problem if I decided to buy more sets of Creators, but then again, let’s cross this when it comes.

I also want to make sure that I don’t have to modify the pieces coming from the original kit. While I’m sure all of those are replaceable, it’s easier to keep them aside, and modify other pieces. I bought myself a box of assorted bricks, and I was lucky to find a few pieces that were already the right colour and shape for what I need.

I have then started dividing the set into rooms, and then for each rooms figured out how many LEDs I want (and where) and how many independent control lines I want. My current design involves bringing either one or two wires in each room: where multiple LEDs are needed in a room, I can connect them in parallel, and where a room has multiple control lines, I can share the ground connection between them.

There’s another question that I needed answering and that would be what the interface between microcontroller and the LEDs would be. I settled for simple pin headers, similar to motherboard front-panel connections, and using Dupont connectors. I’m still uncertain on whether to follow the motherboard option of using pins on the board, and female headers on the LEDs, or go the more theoretical approach of using female headers on the side with actual power going through.

Also as an aside. If you ever decide, like me, to start crimping your own Dupont style connectors, don’t just get the first random crimping tool that Amazon Prime will deliver to you, like I did. Watch the awesome video by bigclive, and go for a better tool. I have been fighting with the one I bought for a whole day, until I watched the video, and the one I’ve been trying to use was one of those he dismissed immediately without even going into details for. I ordered the same IWISS he was using at the end. Your mileage may vary, but it’s worth considering that.

I’m still not sure what the final controller board will look like, but to make things easier for myself, my current design assumes that there’s going to be a single pin pair per LED, connected to a 47Ω resistor. This means that even for rooms with a single control line and three LEDs, I would end up crimping them into a 3×2 connector, wiring the three VCC lines together — as long as the GPIO lines are kept at the same state, this should mean that the current is provided and limited in the right amount I need for those LEDs.

Speaking of GPIO lines — part of the reason why I decided to stick to the STC89C32 that I had at hand was also because they come with quite a few GPIO lines. Indeed, the AT89S52 from Microchip also comes with 32 easily accessible GPIO lines, which is plenty for this project. Unfortunately, they don’t have particularly useful maximum current draw. The LEDs that I got here are fairly bright at 35mA, but not particularly so at less than 3mA that they are getting from the GPIO line as is, and even I/O expanders such as the MCP23016 have a limit of 25mA per line. So instead, I settled for adding transistors, or to be precise to add two ULN2003 Darlington arrays, giving me space to drive 14 LEDs (I only expect 13 of them to be used).

In addition to the time-scheduled updates, I expect to want a button to “fast forward”, which allows me to show off the effects without having to stand around the kit for an hour — and a “full on” that works both as a way to test that everything is working, and as a way for me to take pictures easily.

I don’t have anything remotely sharable about that part of the work just yet. But hopefully soon I’ll be able to get drawings, pictures, or anything at all useful, and start sharing. Because if I didn’t think this horribly wrong, the board itself should be usable for many other configurations, just by programming something different on the micro using the same base software. And as I said previously, I think I’ll try turning around a number of different designs, just for the sake of it.

By now, everybody knows we’ll be spending a few more weeks closed up in our houses, flats, or rooms. And so everybody is looking for new ways to keep busy. While I do have a significant number of incomplete open source projects to dedicate my time to, I also felt I needed something that was just for myself. So I decided to start what could be described as an “art project”.

A few months ago, I have bought for myself a Birch Books Lego set. It’s a lovely set, and I have a particular place in my heart for bookstores in general (despite having switched to ebooks many years ago). I wanted to take good pictures of it, particularly since I have a few macro lenses that should do it justice, but to do so I felt the need for lighting it up.

Now, you can buy light kits on Amazon for it (and for most other kits out there), but I wanted to do something. So I ended up buying a bunch of battery holders, white LEDs, and a box of assorted lego bricks for me to take a look at, for modifications. I also got lucky, and found a number of bricks the right color for the set.

And since I’m a geek and I love overkill solutions, I started thinking “can I make wire this to a microcontroller, and have it control the lights over time?” — Originally I considered keeping it aligned to the wallclock (as in, the time in the real world) but it turned out that it’s not that interesting to change so slowly — and it’s actually much harder. Having it cycle at a fixed speed is much easier, and with a couple of button controls you can do pretty much all you need.

As it turned out, I had most of the stuff I needed at home already: for Valentine’s Day, I ordered three heart-shaped LED kits on eBay (three because that’s how many they sold it as), that came with a microcontroller — a STC89C51, which are Intel 8051 compatible micros with 35 I/O ports. Back then I also decided I would like to try programming one for custom patterns, and bought a programmer/development board as well, and it came with another micro. While this seemed like a fairly niche micro, it made prototyping easy, since it’s a DIP micro, which I can just put on a breadboard.

The first problem I had with this was figuring out how to flash anything on the micro. What I found online suggested using a set of Windows tools that are only in Chinese. I then found another page, that suggests to just use SDCC and a tool called stcgal, which is Python command line tool that allows one-command programming of the micro. This worked great — the Special Function Registers are described in the datasheet, so it shouldn’t be hard to describe in a header.

So I turned to EAGLE first, and KiCad second, trying to figure out how I would layout what I need on a board, and couldn’t find the STC anywhere. And then I started thinking that maybe this is a clone of something else. A few Google searches later, I found the AT89S52 — which turns out to be exactly the same pinout and most likely the same registers as well. The STC89C51 is (mostly) a clone of the AT89S52. It does not appear to share the same programming protocol, and it actually appears to provide a list of additional capabilities and registers that the Microchip MCU does not have, but it does mean I can just write the code targeting the AT89S52, and be done with it.

Now let me remind you that I’m not particularly versed with electronics, so I’ll probably be making tons of mistakes throughout this experience. But I’ll also be trying to provide regular updates on how the project is going and, assuming I do make it to get it to work, I’ll be publishing all the source code, and any schematics I might end up drawing for the project.

I’m actually happy of having found out that the chip is just a Microchip/Atmel chip instead — because this increases not just the usefulness of me talking about the design, and opening up the sources, but also for myself as I would rather play with something that I can reuse later, rather than with some specific micro I just happen to have at home.

Also, I might end up designing a few alternatives for this anyway. The original draft of this blog post was written when I just started thinking this around, but I’m now putting a few more edits on it while having fleshed out some of my intentions for the project, and it might just be I’ll run with a number of different options around. We’ll see.