Baby Room Night Sky using FastLED+Visualight with Pinhole Planetarium
That looks really cool. Are you actually driving a stepper motor right off the Arduino, as in without a driver board?
No theres a driver board that came with the Stepper. The Fritzing graphic was as close as I could find for the stepper model.
Great project. Can you post where you sourced the lighting? When I searched for visualight Google returned a light bulb. Also, did you consider using a continuous rotation servo? You could drive that from the trinket and eliminate the Uno.
The Visualight was a Kickstarter product- https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leifp/visualight that included the full lightbulb. IThey also made a “DIY version” consisting of the bare Leonardo-based PCB, the LED module and an XBee-like wifi module called the “WiFly” that I bought at https://squareup.com/market/visualight. I can’t tell if they still have any in stock, but support for their cloud platform appears to have ended as I can’t get it connected and there have been no replies to any of my queries since 2013! If they are out of stock, I think there are similar PCB-LED modules out there like the Blinkstick.
Also my current goal is to combine the two seperate components into one by running the Neopixel strip off the Visualight board itself since it has a few outputs broken out. That would allow me to use the Pro Trinket as you suggest. However, I don’t see any advantage to using a continuous rotation servo over a stepper motor. Is there any other reason to do this?
Finally, as it looks like I’m close to merging both lights onto the Visualight, my goal is to design a 3D printed Pinhole Planetarium similar to this kit- https://www.adafruit.com/product/1811
The advantage I was thinking with a servo over a stepper motor is that you wouldn’t need a driver board. Just provide enough current from your power source and supply it with a PWM signal and you are good. If you were wanting to get specific positions for the stars, however, this would not be a good solution.
The photo album has been updated to show the final build. I’ll also set up a proper Github repo to host the sketches, Fritzing diagrams and STL files if I add any 3D printed parts.