The translucent button effort - in Projects

A potential LED selection for the knob can be seen here

EDIT: A better option for the knob and buttons is SUNLEDS they are be far the smallest RGB LEDs I've found to date.

mlord

If I make the multicolor buttons can you add a little version of Simon says to Hijack?

This is an insanely complicated scheme. If I wanted to this then I'd hang a chip off the I2C bus inside the empeg. A user land app to do the controlling as well instead of wedging it into the kernel and wasting memory.

I shouldn't say this, but I'm in an incredibly foul mood right now.... If I had a pound for every person who joined this board, came up with a 'great' idea for empeg hardware and software mods and then delivered sweet FA then I'd have at least a tenner.... and just to stop you moaning I'm actually included in this list as I will never have the time to build my DAB tuner.

sorry about the confusion, Ok if the I2C bus is easy to get at then it will be used.

another thing I'm pondering is if I should make the 4 RGB LEDs for the knob a single addressable location or seperate.

n2toh perhaps I'm in a foul mood also or just being a bit b*tchy... but for the last few weeks I've read as you dig up all these old threads and say you can do this or that and you know how to do it. Which is fine... but it seems like you've said the same thing about so many things and spread yourself thin. It seems like if you truly can do this magic that you would take ONE thing and bring it to fruition and work from there. Maybe you are trying to cover all bases for the masterpiece of a redesign you have planned... I have no clue. I know I've read everything from rainbow lights with one controller to USB master with another controller and a Serial hard drive controller and it seems by the time you do all of this, call it a PC and play Doom or whatever on it.

I'm a mechanical engineer and my skills are VERY limited in the electrical realm. And I've been known to dream of some crazy things, but generally I can do a small cost and feasibility study to figure out if any of them are worth pursuing. If one is, I devote all of my energy into it and COMPLETE it... I don't keep spending every day dreaming of some new crazy possibility to keep me from ever finishing ONE of them... I fear that maybe reality hasn't hit you yet in that you have mentioned 10 projets on here and you claim to be able to handle hardware and software for both... I have no reason to doubt you... but once it'd be nice to FINISH one of your ideas and not to keep dreaming up the next... if you never start then it definitely never gets finished.

Wasn't trying to be harsh, it's just that some of this has been so outlandish that I just shake my head and wonder why? I think maybe I've worked for you in a company that went out of business because they spent all of the time coming up with the product but never developing it...

you are 100% correct.

This project is by far the simplest, and is the one I'm going to devote my time to.

Oh, you've got to make them separate. We could have funky circular effects then!

I thought about doing something like this a couple of years back, but never got time to get past the dreaming about it stage. Those tiny leds weren't available then either,

n2toh, welcome back to the boards. I've enjoyed reading your recent flood of empeg ideas. You never know when one of those ideas will catch on and become reality.

I know nothing about electrical engineering and next to nothing about empeg coding. So, I'll just cheer you on and hope that you get something worked out. Good luck.

Haha, Simon on the empeg, using the default beeps as tones. I'd probably shatter my display board from over reacting and slamming the buttons too wildly.

Is there anything in the empeg that can be used as an SPI interface?

Update on the RGB+UV buttons project.

I'm doing a bit of research on how to implement the LED drivers, This is what I have so far.

possible solutions for driving the LEDs required.

1. a TI TLC5940 or TLC5941(this 12 bit PWM allows the most control over each LED, but uses an SPI interface)
2. a Philips PCA9532 (only 8 bit PWM and it has an i2c interface.)
3. a Maxim MAX6964 (only 8 bit PWM and worse the top 4 bits are global to all LEDs, but also has an i2c interface.)
4. use an ATMEL uC (this requires coding and debugging and is limited to 10 bit PWM on most chips.)
5. a Philips PCA9533; 4-bit I²C LED dimmer (this is only a 4 channel driver)

solution 1 requires a chip to convert i2c to SPI.
solutions 1,2,3 require two chips to control 32 LEDs, omitting the UV LEDs would allow a single chip solution and the knob to be controlled as a single location.

solution 4 may be done with one chip, but a two chip solution solves the ISP problem.
solution 5 would control all locations at once, also like colors need to be wired in series.)

I wonder if any of the Ring'O'Lights technology would be useful here. Does anyone know how how those are normally driven?

-ml

What are the available addresses on the I2C bus in the empeg?