DIY: Neopixel Goggles
Being out dancing this weekend, I felt the urge to pimp my steampunk goggles with LEDs. Thinking a few minutes about this, I realized I probably wanted something Arduino based, and thinking another minute I figured someone else must already have made this project.
And yes, of course there were already Youtube videos and Adafruit tutorials. I just needed my local supplier to hook me up with a Trinket microcontroller and two Neopixel rings. A friend borrowed me his soldering kit, another friend acted as my sounding board and gave soldering advice and voilá! All set!
As always, for some reason the hardest part of any Arduino project is to get the Arduino IDE working on Ubuntu. Board managers that should take two minutes to get working take one hour of trouble shooting… eventually I fixed it by using my work laptop’s Windows partition.
I also didn’t have a cable peeler, and at first only cables with stranded core. Not recommended for precision work! Another tricky part is that the Adafruit schematics is showing the “right way”. Since the cables should be going from the front to the back, I had to flip the schematics in my head, and sometimes I did it twice, ending up on wrong. I found it helpful to simply mirror the schematics.
I haven’t soldered very much in my life, but I’m surprised that it’s considerably easier than knitting. Especially on these giant Neopixel rings there isn’t much that can go wrong… except for a cable snapping from being peeled with the wrong tools. Be careful with that.
The schematics call for a small and neat battery pack to hide in the goggles, but that’s not for me. I like the cyborg estetique and have no issue with visible wires to a normal power bank. if that’s what you want too, you want to use the USB rather than BAT on the Trinket.
For the code I just went for the default sketch from the start, modifying it slightly as I’ve been using them. I’m playing with the thought of accelerometers or just some kind of pseudo-random function.
The Adafruit tutorial suggests that you use paper instead of the shaded lenses that the goggles are shipped with, but I went for something fancier: IKEA’s transparent anti-slip mat for kitchen drawers! I just assured their flatness with an iron and some baking paper, Hama bead style.
I’m bursting with new ideas for other projects to build. Only issue: these ain’t cheap to build. If I would have had the patience to wait for shipping, this project would have been a tiny bit cheaper. Now it cost me just under 40 Euro, not including goggles, cables or powerbank.
