Easy Light Show for Laptop

This is a low cost way of adding light ambiance when playing movies or music videos. Cost is $19 US. I think the kids will love it ! My cat loves to watch the screen . I love it !

The tools you needs for the project:

1. Circuit Playground - Developer Edition 2.

2. USB cable - A/MiniB

I have a acer laptop with Windows 10 installed and have to install some drivers. If you have a Mac or Lynx computer you can skip this step. Adafruit has the perfect instructions for this and if you follow them you should have no issues.

Download Windows Drivers

Next download the Windows Installer for Arduino. and download the Adalight Master.

Download link is here for Adalight Master and Arduino

Download Link for Adalight Master

Download Link for Arduino

I copied and unzipped the files on my Desktop.

Now plug in the Circuit Playground.to your USB port on the laptop.You need to select the Board you have and make note of the Port. Click on Tools -> Board -> Adafruit Circuit Playground. The port number should show below that.

Now lets load Circuit Playground with the software .Open up your unzipped folder called Adalight-master. Open Arduino and then LEDStream-Circuit Playground folder. Highlight the file LED stream-CircuitPlagound and click on open.and the program should be ready to upload. You should receive a message at the bottom when uploading is complete.

Next download the processing sketch from here:

Download Processing

I selected Windows 64-bit to download. I again copied the zip file to my desktop. After I extracted the file I opened the folder processing-3.3.6.

Before the code is loaded we need to find the index of the port and modify the program or it will not work. I found this handy snippet of code .When I ran the code than it shows the index is 0 for COM3. Yours is probably different.

import processing.serial.*;

// The serial port Serial myPort;

// List all the available serial ports printArray(Serial.list());

Now I am ready to find and upload the code. We are going back to the Adalight-master:

From Processing open up your unzipped folder called Adalight-master. Open the Processing folder then Adalight_Circuit Playground. Highlight_Circuit Playground.pde. You need to modify this line if your code came up with a different index.

static final byte serialPortIndex = 0;

This is important to make you light show work ! Please feel free to ask me questions.

You want to tape the Circuit Playground to the back of your screen. The USB port should be down. Make sure if your lid contains any metal than attach the board to an index card. Then use tape to keep it in place. I just put some sticky notes in back of my laptop. Now you are ready to run Processing and create a light show