IDE breakout board arrived!

[Andrew Stone]

Hi everyone,

The IDE to RJ-45 and PCB breakout board has arrived!  And it even works!!!
Here are some photos of the board:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/yTzIIH-eR3oQMDmWxiWepA
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/J5s2DzuzEmlWotGGxwHj0g
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/Ej-D9VeersvUeUR-QeOytg?feat=directlink

Connected up!
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/HQbAJCO7sxpp3fKx_xt5DA?feat=directlink


This board has a few features.

It can convert your 40 pin IDE into a 40 pin .1" 1 row header that can be plugged into a breadboard.  This is a direct 1-1 conversion.

Also, it converts the 40 pins into 6 RJ-45 jacks.  Each RJ-45 contains 8 wires.  Six of the eight wires are connected to sequential IDE and breadboard pins.  The other two can be assigned to various "special" Lightuino pins (default is the LED power coming from the Lightuino), or to your choice by plugging into a header.  But every RJ-45 shares this assignment (think power and ground, or for 2 RGB LEDs think 2 power lines).

It also contains nice screw holes on each side for mounting in a surface cutout of your project box (using right angle brackets).


Uses:

1. Convert the Lightuino sinks into cat-5 (ethernet) cables to drive LEDs set farther apart then ribbon cable goes.

2. Connect the Lightuino sinks to a breadboard.

Also non-Lightuino uses:

3. Connect a breadboard to a ribbon cable.

4. Connect breadboard to RJ-45 cables.

It comes as a kit costing $15 with all the parts, OR $7 without the RJ-45 jacks (yes those jacks are NOT cheap!).  It handles a SINGLE IDE cable, so you'd need 2 of them for the whole Lightuino.

So its $30 to handle a whole Lightuino.  This may seem expensive since the L5 board itself only costs twice as much. HOWEVER, its cheap compared to your time doing all this wiring, and you know, its wierd, nowadays with chips so cheap the connectors and PCB footprints are actually major costs!

Cheers!
Andrew

[Erick Nava Aldana]

Nice work Andrew, I hope soon order two and one L5, I was playing for a while with my v3 and v3 shield and done some projects, but think its thime to get another one.

Happy week end to all!

[Andrew Stone]

Hi Paul,

That's great!!!  & thanks for the mention on the blog (http://gardenofmissedconnections.blogspot.com/ for other readers).  I'm glad the boards are working for you.  I noticed that you said you guys created some color conversion code (it sounds like you convert HSV (hue saturation value) to RGB).  Can you post that code as I think others may be interested in it since it makes it easy to do rainbow effects?

Two notes about the boards (maybe you already figured it out!):  If you wire them up following either standard (see
http://www.zytrax.com/tech/layer_1/cables/tech_lan.htm#contents for example), then one RGB power 4 wire group will be on one set of 2 twisted pairs, and the other on the other set of 2.  This lets you remove the outer plastic on the ethernet cable and easily send the 2 groups of wires to different locations.

So if you use TIA/EIA 568B  wiring then 6 and 8 (solid B and G) are power, and then then rest 1,2,3,4,5,7  are R,G,B, R2,G2,B2.  Well, I guess the actual colors depend on what LEDs you connect up!!  I always connect R first then G then B.  So removing the colors what I meant is if you use the jack named "RJ1" then the corresponding Lightuino sinks are 0,1,2,3,4,5.  RJ2 jack -> 6,7,8,9,10,11 (and so on).

Also, if you are doing your own ethernet wiring -- and I highly recommend it to save $ (esp. if you are doing long runs) -- then you can pretty easily connect 2 ethernet cables to a single jack (using only 4 of the wires in each cable). This lets you leave the protective shielding on the cable but you can still power 2 LEDs in completely different locations.  This is what I have:  http://www.amazon.com/Genica-1000-Ft-CAT5e-Crimper-Tester/dp/B000YYIRRU
I got mine for $50 so you might want to shop around.  But that was several years ago -- perhaps during a glut caused by the switch over to home wireless.

Cheers!
Andrew

On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 10:26 PM, Paul Laskowski <pa...@ischool.berkeley.edu> wrote:

Andrew, we got the boards and we love them!  If you care to follow
along with us, we have a few videos up of our first time hooking
everything up to the lanterns:

http://gardenofmissedconnections.blogspot.com/

[Seppo Pietarinen]

Hi Andrew,

This would have been excellent for my project where I already wired 69
LED channels separately... It works fine but is not beautiful or very
reliable...

Does it connect 1 pin to 1 wire in CAT-5? How much current would one
be able to put through the cable? Does it matter that the wires in the
cable are twisted?

Maybe I'll order some stuff soon...

Kind regards,
Seppo

On Jul 25, 8:01 am, Andrew Stone <g.andrew.st...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>

> That's great!!!  & thanks for the mention on the blog (http://gardenofmissedconnections.blogspot.com/for other readers).  I'm glad

> <p...@ischool.berkeley.edu>wrote:

[Paul Laskowski]

Hi Andrew, thanks for _your_ plug:) Yes, here's the code our campmate
Misha Lipatov put together for the color wheel. There's no saturation
variable (I think we keep everything fully saturated), so it's not
really an HSV to RGB converter. Unlike the basic sketch patterns, you
have to call color_wheel_chase() repeatedly to make it run. This is
so we can sample sound in between updates.

// set a lantern color with RGB values, each from 0 to 8192
void setLanternColor(int lantern, int r, int g, int b)
{
pwm.brightness[lantern * 6]= r;
pwm.brightness[lantern * 6 + 1]= g;
pwm.brightness[lantern * 6 + 2]= b;
}

// set a lantern color with a hue (between 0 and 360) and brightness value
void setLanternColor(int lantern, int hue, int brightness)
{
// when hue is between 0 and 60, r = brightness, b = 0.0 and g goes
linearly from
// 0.0 to brightness; similarly, r goes down when 60<hue<120, b
ramps up when 120<hue<180,
// g goes down when 180<hue<240, r ramps up when 240<hue<300 and b -
down when 300<hue<360.
static int r, g, b;

r = (60*(hue<60) + (120-hue)*((hue>=60)&&(hue<120)) + /*
0*((hue>=120)&&(hue<240))/60 + */
(hue-240)*((hue>=240)&&(hue<300)) + 60*(hue>=300))*(brightness/60);
g = (hue*(hue<60) + 60*((hue>=60)&&(hue<180)) +
(240-hue)*((hue>=180)&&(hue<240))
/* + 0*(hue>240) */ )*(brightness/60);
b = (/* 0*(hue<120) + */ (hue-120)*((hue>=120)&&(hue<180)) +
60*((hue>=180)&&(hue<300)) +
(360-hue)*(hue>=300))*(brightness/60);

setLanternColor(lantern, r, g, b);
}

void color_wheel_chase()
{
static int hue=0; // the hue
static int increment=8; // a number by which to increment hue
static int lantern_number=4; // number of lanterns

int h=hue;
for (int i=0; i<lantern_number; i++) {
setLanternColor(i, h, Lightuino_MAX_BRIGHTNESS);
h = (h + (360/lantern_number)) % 360;
}

hue = (hue + increment) % 360;

[Andrew Stone]

Hi Seppo,

Nice to hear from you!  Can we get some photos of your project?!

6 CAT-5 wires are connected to pins in the Lightuino, the remaining 2 are your choice.  But a solder blob lets them carry power from pin 37.
There are 6 RJ45 connectors per board so that makes 36 total wires which fits the 35 outputs on the IDE cable well.

There is a new standard called POE or Power over Ethernet  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet that specifies a LOT more power then the Lightuino itself uses.  So you are quite safe pushing 60mA through the cable.  Also, note that the CAT-5 cabling is 24 gauge copper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_5_cable) so you can drive a lot of current thru it.  Here is a good rule of thumb table: http://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htm .  In there you'll see that it puts the max value at 3.5A, ignoring skin effects.

WRT the twisting, it does not matter... it may reduce EM emissions which is good.  And it would be unlikely that currents strong enough to light the LEDs could be induced...  Certainly I'm not seeing any LEDs turn on due to induced currents given 10-15 feet of cable.

Cheers!
Andrew

[Seppo Pietarinen]

Hi all, 

Yes it's finally up and running and I'm more or less pleased with the result :-)

The project is a shop front with five letters made of 6mm thick white acrylic sheet lit by 23 half a meter long RGB LED strips. Each of the strips is individually controllable thanks to Lightuino's 70 channels. So I'm using 69 out of the 70 channels. 

Because each of the LED channels draws around 150mA I had to build a 69 channel transistor PCB using a bunch of 8 channel darlington transistor arrays. Again the credits go to Andrew for the instructions. Then I wired each of the channels separately from the transistor array so I ended up having 69 independent wires, here the CAT-5 cable would be very very handy... very handy indeed.

Finally I attached the LED strips to a metal plate and hung it behind the acrylic letters to a distance of some 10cm. I think I'll have to try to move the strips even closer as I'd like to get more light out of them. I'm also considering adding some more LED strips (that would basically mean doubling the strip count) to get more light.

I created some simple effects for Lightuino the nicest of which is a HSL rainbow effect that can be seen in the photo.

Right now I only have a low quality cell phone photo but I'll attach it anyway. 

BTW the shop is located in the Condado Shopping Center in Quito, Ecuador. We sell accessories and jewelry for men and women.

Thanks and kind regards,

Seppo

[Andrew Stone]

Nice!  If you put up some higher resolution photos (or email them to me, you have my address) I'd like to link to them from my web site!  The color transition that is visible in the "A" is really smooth!

Cheers!
Andrew