Techno Mohawk

Make a techno mohawk with Arduino; ATTiny85; WS2812/2811 individually addressable RGB LED strip

This contraption was crafted in 4 hours or so in due course of Singapore Mini Maker Faire.

Data from my previous blog entry http://shin-ajaran.blogspot.sg/2014/04/wearable-electronics-arduino-x-attiny85.html do help to reduce time/effort needed to construct this contraption.

Parts needed

1x Arduino as the In System Programmer (ISP); detail guide here http://shin-ajaran.blogspot.sg/2014/01/setting-up...

1x ATTiny85 ISP shield; detail guide here http://shin-ajaran.blogspot.sg/2014/01/setting-up...

1x ATTiny85 break out board of choice; using custom MitG PCB

1x ATTiny85 1x WS2812/2811 addressable RGB LED strip (it can be neopixel from adafruit, or pseudo neopixel from middle country:aliexpress)

assorted length of 5mm side glow fiber optic cables

1x toy helmet from your local brick and motar business

feel free to use any breakout board of choice for ATTiny85. In this example, a customized PCB is used.

The wiring is identical to the one explained in adafruit neopixel uberguide

Data pin from the addressable WS2812 RGB LED strip to pin of your choice. In this case, digital pin4 of ATTiny85. a 10k resistor is used between the data pin of the ATTiny85 and WS2812 RGB LED strip data pin. NOTE: must ensure common ground by connecting ground wire of RGB LED strip to ground pin of MCU.

supply is 5v 1A from a mobile power bank that is meant to power up a smart phone

The LED strip is then stick to the toy helmet with some adhesive, and the assorted length of side glow fibre optic cables is applied with hot glue to the individual LEDs' on the LED strip.

Programming the hardware

First, ensure all the hardware are setup accordingly to the tutorial earlier. E.g ATTiny85 on the ISP shield, ISP shield on the Arduino. USB cable is plugged in, and drivers are installed for Arduino. Set the “programmer” to Arduino as ISP, as depicted in the image above.

Set the “board” to ATtiny85 8MHz. Rule of thumb, choose 1MHz if low energy consumption is required, the downside, computation speed of the code will be affected. 20MHz option will not work out of the box, this option requires an external oscillator as the clock. Set the “Serial Port” to the one detected on your computer.

Double check the “parameters” on the lower right hand corner as depicted in the image above. Everything seems to be prim and rosy. But we are not done yet. If ATTiny85 is new out of the box, need to do the following step to burn the “bootloader”. Otherwise the code will be compiled, downloaded accordingly, but could not start the program upon reset. Else, the above can be skip if the ATTiny has been programmed at 8Mhz.

source code used is available at my blog http://shin-ajaran.blogspot.sg/2014/07/techno-mohawk-maker-faire-arduino.html