In... holy carp that's getting close, 2 1/2 weeks The Dancer's non-profit will be having its 10th Annivesary Celebration show where they'll be performing 13 pieces from the previous 10 shows (including the one we just put on a few weeks ago). Normally I have a lot of work to do in the lead up to a show- putting together the playbill, promo materials, and of course any props or special things she wants for the show itself. For this show however, since it's entirely material already performed, I at most need to decide if I want to make an updated version of the 'burning room' motion graphics I put together like 5 years ago or if (as I suspect) the original file will still work just fine. So I've had time to think about other things to do- and came up with something I think will be pretty cool, and I hope she will appreciate as well.
I have a couple of unused oversized LEGO baseplates- 48x48 studs vs. the standard 36x36 stud plate, and over the last week or so have figured out how to make a decent re-creation of the organization's logo in LEGO and partitioned the plate off to be able to make small dioramas of each of the pieces that will be in the show (1 large center one that will have the one that the outreach kids perform in with the logo behind them, and 12 smaller ones around it), ordered a crapton of off-brand minifigs (I'll save explaining why, it just worked best) and other pieces that I needed to make the logo in the closest LEGO, and worked out how to try and set up each diorama so it's actually possible to do with the LEGO and also be recognizable as the dance piece it represents.
I was originally going to just leave it at that- but one thing initially nagged at me: one of the pieces in the show (the finale actually- in no small part because it involves throwing a crapton of shredded paper 'snow' onto the stage from above) has a lit old-school lamp post on the stage (which I literally just learned is not in fact going to be used for this setting of the piece... -_-;) , so of course the diorama has a LEGO lamp post in it. But it just didn't seem like that was quite enough and combined with the fact that several of the pieces are most notable because of their lighting made me want to include lighting in the diorama. Given I'd worked with small fairy lights when I made the Drone (on a Schteek)s for the show a few weeks ago, I knew I could use those and have ordered a multicolor pack of them that will have all the colors I need.
Now, to why I create this thread (4 paragraphs in... why am I an engineer and not a writer again?). The simple thing to do would be to wire everything up so that the lights would all be on at once- but a) that's kind of boring and b) several of the pieces are most notable because of alternating spot lighting, so being able to recreate that in the diorama would make them far better. So- I need a way to program and control a bunch of LEDs to do different things, and figured that an Arduino or some other simple programmable microcontroller would be the way to go. I did search a bit before, and found this thread which made it sound like one (or multiple stacked) Adafruit 'feather' boards might be appropriate.
Most of the 13 (counting the larger center part) dioramas don't need anything more than one channel- the lights would either be on or off, nothing fancy for 11. One of them has two alternating 'spot lights' that I'd like to have alternate every few seconds, and the last is the 'burning room' piece where I'd like to have several LEDs flashing on and off behind the trans-red & trans-orange fire pieces to make it look even more like fire. Since the LED-focused Adafruit board has 8 channels, I can limit that one to 3 lights to keep it to 16 total channels (11 for the simple ones, 2 for the spots, and 3 for the fire). I'd like to have one or two more for the fire, but it's probably overkill (OK, this whole project is kind of overkill, but...).
Does anyone know if there is something that would work even better than the Adafruit Feather boards linked in the other thread for this? The fairy lights use a fairly low-power 3V button batteries, and while that wouldn't likely work for running the microcontroller it sounds like it can output the right voltage for them even if I have it running on more power itself.
The 2 biggest challenges would be wiring up all of the lights and the programming. I'd like there to be 2 different overall options: one where all of the dioramas are lit/running at once, and another where it cycles through the 13 dioramas, keeping each individual one lit for like 10-15 seconds before moving on to the next one- from what I know of the boards I think that would be as simple as adding a switch on several pins and programming it so it looks to see if that/those pin(s) are active and then decide which routine to run depending on that.
Does this sound doable (and in the roughly 2 weeks that I have)? Is there anything else that I should be looking at, or advice anyone has? Thanks!
