Hey everyone! Thanks for reading today’s blog post! For the past two weeks, I’ve looked at several big questions that will dictate the course of this entire project. The first question is how to power the lights. They run off of 5 volt energy, and a typical wall socket puts out 240 volts. That’s a huge difference. Fortunately, Amazon sells a product that steps down the voltage from a wall socket to 5 volts. Here’s the link- it even comes with a little piece that lets me attach wires to the positive and negative outputs!
Amazon link DC power converter
However, the next big question doesn’t have a quick Amazon fix. We want to sync these lights up to the HCC media wall, which would be insanely cool. I met with Josiah, who runs the Media Wall, on Monday. He told me that the media wall is controlled by a Macbook and is connected via cables that run from the projector to a closet on the second floor of the HCC. The projector itself can’t connect to WiFi or Bluetooth. Upon further reflection, the best way to sync the lights with an ethernet-controlled projector is probably… massive amounts of code that time the lights really specifically. Oh, and turning everything on at the exact same time.
Trying to brute-force the project presents another difficulty: that of timing. Arduino coding can do almost anything, but what it can’t do is magically know the time. In order to set the lights on a cycle that matches the media wall during the day and shifts to something soothing at night, I have to program the Arduino to count every second and add it all up.
I visited my favorite Internet forum (Arduino Project Hub) to find out more about counting seconds and found some handy open-source code made for a clock. I’m attaching the link below as this blog post’s code. Of course, it’ll take modification, but there is potential within this code for a 24-hour system that controls sparkly lights and changes vibes completely during the night. I hope you have fun with this code, and I can’t wait to include my version of it!