A knock came at the door this morning at 7:15am. Outside stood a nice man from DHL bringing me 70 blue and 70 green high-brightness LEDs, and some cabling for the looms! Just need the red ones now and some veroboard, and I can start constructing the modules (64 of the buggers) which will cast light on our mad little project.

Last night was spent in Harry’s, where me and Si worked out the final bits of DDF version 1 and also spent some time fiddling with what sort of sprites we might be able to plot on the display.

This should work. Hopefully. Actually I’m quite optimistic! *cough*

Edit: Turns out Maplin screwed up the order. I actually have 55 blue LEDs and 120 green LEDs. *sigh*

I spent Sunday morning working on the controller for mine and Si’s Disco Dancefloor – I figured it would probably be a bit silly to build the whole thing without having an idea if the circuitry would work so pulled out every LED I had spare and built a model matrix.

It didn’t work first time – that’d be daft, but that wasn’t due to my dodgy wiring: the Matrix class which comes with the Arduino software didn’t address the MAX7229. There’s others out there though, and LedControl on the Arduino Playground site did the job just fine leading to many flashing lights, and much bouncing and cheering.

The wiring matrix is a bit of a pig – we’ll have to be careful when wiring that one up, especially since it’s meant to be separate modules you can just bolt together. It also requires an external +5VDC PSU though I suppose as long as you don’t light up too many LEDs the whole thing could probably be USB-powered… mind, I don’t really want to risk that.

Next steps: I understand Si’s completed two of the underfloor frame matrices now and will be doing the base in the next day or so. LEDs are on order from Maplin although the high-brightness red ones aren’t in stock so will have to be crossed later on in the week. I’m waiting for the bloke who does the acrylic to get back to me, then I think we have at least some flashing and fun! W00t!

There’s a very poor-quality video of Sunday’s triumph here.

For those of you who have managed to miss me spouting on about it to anyone who’ll listen, me and Si had a daft idea in the pub. That idea was to build an underlit disco dance floor. I’m not going to make a full post about it since we’re adding notes to a project page of sorts but I was dead chuffed today that I got the first test cell working.

There’s video here in some mad AVI format taken with the Canon G9.

I’ve created a new category – Projects – for construction and electronics madness that doesn’t fit into any other category. There’s a new project in the offing so I’ll probably post more here soonish.