First Night lantern
This portable lantern for Boston’s First Night / Figment celebration is made from 25 pixels of WS2811, an Arduino Nano, and a frosted plastic ‘take out food’ container from Michaels Arts and Crafts.
Power comes from a portable phone charger that takes AA batteries and provides 5v USB power. Two AA’s should run this lantern for 4+ hours; despite the highly kinetic display, most of the LEDs are ‘off’ most of the time! Typical power draw is only around 100mA.
I <3 the lantern thing.
Thanks! There will be five people in our posse on First Night, and I’m hoping to equip each of us with a different lantern. Of course, I made that plan before I came down with this headcold…
I’m doing a torture-test on this lantern today: starting with a fresh set of two Energizer alkaline AA batteries, and seeing how long it can run continuously before it goes dark. I’ll post results when I have them. So far: two hours and running fine.
you’ve got plenty of space to string a collection of aa batteries in there! time should be no issue!
6+ hours so far on the first pair of AA batteries. I doubt we’ll be outside that long, but this is getting interesting.
And having said that, I’m now getting low-power brownout resets.
I’m going to call it six hours.