Above is the brains of the Wow Suit. The Raspberry Pi A+. I have 2, one is a backup in case I step on the 1st :) For $50 you cant really pass up on this power house. The RPI runs the following stack of software:
The MRAA library – which gives SPI access to any NodeJS app
The Wow Suit software
I have also placed an order for a body suit, and will be building the 1st panel in the coming days to test out a new layout . Also in the pipeline is 20 Meters of APA102 144ppm LED Strips.
A photo posted by Elec Dash Tron Dot Org (@wow_elec_tron) on
Above is an awesome still shot of me wearing the Wow Suit and the V4 LED MaskHot glueis not the best thing to use when making complicated electronics used in the Australian outback! Who would have thought ? Whilst none of my creations suffered at all, it was the very 1st thought that ran through my head as i opened my car at 5pm after a 30 sunny day. I met some very interesting people, one awesome gent told me about E6000 which is a solvent glue that solidifies hard permanently. I will be trilling this for my future wearable projects
The best way to test your power usage is to run it in a real world scenario. The wow suit lasts for exactly 6 hours on 4 x 10ah packs. The 5th power pack, which i use to power the RPiA+, was 70% full after the 2nd night of use. I managed to to swap over the 4 LED power packs at about midnight with the help of my bestest friends.
A video posted by Elec Dash Tron Dot Org (@wow_elec_tron) on
People LOVE to hug at festivals. Why didn’t i think about this one? about every 3rd person who came up to to check out the suit wanted to hug me. “I want a light hug” …. “bright hug me”….”oh my god woooow…can I please hug you”. This is totally awesome, and an absolutely acceptable way to go WOW in my books! No one was denied a hug…well almost no one, there was that one really smelly naked hippy! The suit stood up to the challenge and didn’t break.
Test your code over and over! Whilst standing in front of a small crowd of people, suddenly my whole right side went dark….i immediately freaked out…and then 5 seconds later immediately got a wave of relief when I realised I coded the frame to buffer incorrectly whilst shifting pixels! I then stopped looking down at myself in fear of seeing this dreaded bug every 10 minutes.
A photo posted by Elec Dash Tron Dot Org (@wow_elec_tron) on
If you plan to wear almost 2000 very bright animated LEDs on your body, PLAN your evening accordingly. I found myself unable to enter any small covered areas in fear of freaking out the crowd around me. I also stood helpless as hundreds of very munted people drooled over the animations! This i didn’t mind so much, i just wasn’t prepared for it.
A video posted by Elec Dash Tron Dot Org (@wow_elec_tron) on
I put a strip in the head, onto the bust, all the way up the spine and along the lower parts of the front facing legs. The whole thing uses about 68 LEDs from a WS2812b strip. I used a NodeMCU for this, just for shits and giggles and to see if i could get it to drive WS2812B strips. I used THIS modified NeoPixel driver with the NodeMCU module running at 160Mhz. Note you must use the UART driven library on Pin 4. Here is another example:
Custom built, as are all my other creations, ran into some trouble with this one. Had to perform some surgery on one of the LED Strip joints, after it was all hot glued in.
This one is for a mates Burning Seed outfit. Nothing like a one of a kind to wow the crowd. I’m using paper strips to test out different layouts and to see what can be done on the outskirts if the hat and the top.
I had some issues with these new LED strips, one of the strips had a dud LED which is always irritation, thankfully the process of cutting and connecting each strip., is 100 time faster with this model strip.
Above is the semi completed product running a test program to check each LED. I’m awaiting delivery of a bunch more Arduino Mega Modules, one of which is going into this hat. For now I’m using a Due to test the strips.
Big thanks to Tals for the Jellyfish name! Love it
I am still waiting on the Mega modules, ordered last week. Not sure what the postage hold up is. In the meantime, I managed to get the Galileo Gen1 to work!! So many bugs and wrong turns on this device.
●The firmware update instructions are very unclear…the device must have NO sd card inserted and then booted up with the usb port plugged in. It then comes up as a serial.port for the firmware update to work.
●To my surprise, i ran the latest IOT image, the same one used on the Gen2 board. It worked…with bugs..
●SPI functionality via MRAA is non existent on the Gen1. Even with the lastest 7.3 mraa moduke. The clock signal on my scope was garbage! Very disapointing
●SPI via arduino sketches is also flaky, at a setting of 8mhz i was only able to get around 2-3mhz clock before it skewed into noise
On a whim i ended up trying the pi-spi nodejs module and it worked at 3mhz!!! But when i rebooted i got noise on the spi pins…hours later i realised that if I ran an arduino sketch that uses spi before hand, spi was usable again…so i wrote an arduino sketch that initialised the spi and did nothing else…at boot time the sketch starts and about 10 seconds later the xdk daemon launches the main.js script…and bam!!!
Mine is hand made, from PVA and newspaper an is obviously not as neat, but this is just the base of the piece.
I wanted something new for Glow Festival in Windsor. The GSPF team have some projections on Greville Street Prahran…
The layout is done, although I may try 2 different address mappings to see which looks the best. The current wiring layout is like so:
I’m still thinking weather to make the front and back rows line up or to keep the centre of the helmet lined up. Wither way it will look great. I’m using a Mega for this piece as ill need 4k base ram just for the Address layout and the bitmap video ram driver I have developed.
We had a blast at the Gertrude Street Projection Festival Robot party last night. Thanks a bunch to everyone who came and all the people who made an effort with costumes. The Wow Suit did very well, no glitches, worked for 4 hours solid and the batteries did not die! Was very hot and sweaty however…
Here are 2 pics from the GSPF Photogs, great thanks to Nicky Pastore (more coming soon I’m Told):
No pictures as it was a disaster at 1st. There was not enough power being distributed via the power rails that daisy chain along each module. Only about 1/4 of the suit worked, whilst the rest flickered wildly. I ended up soldering in 3 additional power taps into the daisy chain at different spots and that got the suit up and running. I will most likely need to solder in a power tap into each of the 12 modules. Even after reducing the maximum power level to 50 (out of 255) i noticed that when the suit was white, drawing the most current, it began to flicker a little. This was a dead indicator of low power. I may need more than 4 power banks…maybe a whole backpack
I received 4 new 10Ah Battery Modules today from this eBay store. Pretty damn cheap, $110 aud for 4 packs.
