DIY a Colorful Pyramid

Last week there're more than a dozen students visit our office at Shenzhen. They came from Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts. Some of our engineers work with them to make something, you can think that it's a combine of Art and Electrical. Finally there're four awesome was completed.

This is an interactive device that looks like a pyramid, which can open and close. At normal time, the pyramid is close, you can clap to make some noise to open it. When it's opened, you can find a smaller pyramid with colorful light.

The idea is came from the students' graduation project, they are planning to make a robot that can can breeding, sounds incredible but awesome. You can think that a big pyramid have a baby pyramid.

If you like it and want to make one yourself, let's go MAKING.

Follow is the things we need:

Electrical modules

Grove Joint

Grove - Joint v2.0 shares many similarities with Seeeduino Lotus. It is a mini ATMEGA328 Microcontroller development board. It uses an Atmel ATMEGA328P-MU and CH340. ATMEGA328P-MU is a high performance, low power AVR 8-Bit Microcontroller. CH340 is a USB bus converter chip that can realize a USB to serial interface. Grove - Joint v2.0 has two Grove interfaces included I2C port and two digital I/Os. It else support battery powered. You can do some simple applications with it.

WS2812B Led

WS2812 is an intelligent control LED light source that the control circuit and RGB chip are integrated in a package of 5050 components. It includes intelligent digital port data latch and signal reshaping amplification drive circuit. Also include a precision internal oscillator and a 12V voltage programmable constant current control part, effectively ensuring the pixel point light color height consistent.

Grove - I2C Mini Motor Driver

The Grove – Mini I2C motor driver is a very tiny motor driver with I2C interface, and it includes two motor driver chips - DRV8830, which helps you control two DC motors or winding of stepper motors on a small board simultaneously.

Grove - Sound Sensor

The Sound sensor module is a simple microphone. Based on the power amplifier LM386 and the electret microphone, it can be used to detect the sound strength of the environment. The value of output can be adjusted by the potentiometer.

Others

• hinge x 6
• screw
• AB glue

• fishing line

Acrylic and Laser Cutter

3mm wooden board3mm Lucency AcrylicAs for the Laser cutter, you can find one easily in a Hacker Space, if there's no hacker space near to you, you can try the Laser Cutting Service supply by Seeed.

First of all, download the 2D file to cut the wooden board and acrylic. You will get many parts, you can refer to the image.

Then let's go to the next step to install it.

Get the four big triangle boards to make a big pyramid.

Some metal hinges and screw are needed here.

To make the pyramid has a nice looking, you can also print something on it.

After the pyramid is done. It's time to make its baby, a smaller pyramid.

You need to place 3 WS2812B LED inside the small pyramid before it's fixed.

And do some soldering, connect them together. Finally, there'a Grove cable connect to Din of the LED, and through the hole.

We need to make a base to place the pyramid.

And inside the base, there're the electric modules as well as the gear motor.

Some AB glue or 3M glue will be helpful here.

Connection as below:

• Joint A0 > Grove - Sound Sensor
• Joint I2C Port > Grove - Mini I2C Motor Driver
• Joint D3 > WS2812 LED

Download the code attached.

Here I suppose that you had used Arduino before.

Just chose the right boards - Arduino Pro/Mini (3.3V, 8M)Atmega 328, and the right port number.

Click Upload(Ctrl+U), Then the code is ready, you will find the leds are on.

Some of the steps is no very detailed, I am really sorry for that.

But if you finally made one yourself, there's something need to notice:

1. The motor is important, reduction ratio should > 50
2. When power on, it need about 10s to initialize, don't make noise in that time.

Happy MAKING.

Cheers.