Friday, November 19, 2010

Amblone RGB lighting system.

This is my first official project. Its based on Bart van der Drift's project on Amblone.com.

I have modified his arduino code for it to fit Arduino Duemilanove, which only has 6 PWM (pulse width modulation) pins.

This is a few pictures of the actual circuit.  You can clearly see one full RGB channel. It uses 2N3904 transistors and 2.2kOhm resistors.  Since this is a Arduino Duemilanove, the PWM pins are 3, 5, 6 for the first channel and 9, 10, 11 for the second channel.














I quickly made a box out of a miniwheats cereal box.  (This will eventually be upgraded.)
I use sectioned IDE cables for connections from the protoboard to the LED strips.






































This quick demo shows solid colors being projected behind the screen.  Video is also very good with this system although, if you are using Windows 7 like me, you might see some harsh framerates or loops per second (lps) to help this out, you can change you windows theme to classic, as I did.  My lps jumped from 3-4 to around 14-17.   Games can also support it, but usually you'll need to play in windowed mode, the amblone software will limit the framerates on the game though, which can get annoying, but for CPU friendly games, it is quite pleasant.
This is the back of the circuit board.

Hello world!

Hello world, here is my first post concerning my electronics online portfolio, in which I'll be posting my projects and results :-D