Some experience required

Hi,

I just got my arduino, learning slowly, mind is being blasted by the possibilities that electronics have. Anyway, I've thought of something that would be neat to build, but no idea whether its doable (or practical.) please advise.

I was imagining combining an RGB LED (pref surface mount) with some sort of wifi antenna and battery and whatever else i'm not anticipating but will need to make this work into as small as package as possible (say 1"x1"x1/2") to make little lights that can be controlled wirelessly. I was hoping i could then have a bunch of these little things kicking around, and i could send commands to them wirelessly. things like color, variation rate, and whatever other effects could then be controlled from an arduino hooked up to an old wireless router (?) for fun lighting effects without wires everywhere.

Is this possible?

I'm still an electronics rookie so bear with me, is this even possible or am i missing some fundamentals?

Thank you for any insight.

Sure.
Take a look at a little board like a ProMini, or my Mini-uino board,
, assembly required

connect it to an RF receiver, some examples here
http://www.robotshop.com/general-rf-data-telemetry.html?p=1-20
and a LiIon or LiPo battery and your RGB LED & 3 resistors.
Then work out an address/data protocol they will all listen to, to know when to change something.

Skyle, presumably you've heard the phrase "The sky is the limit." ? Well, in this case, your creativity is the limit. Pretty much anything you can think of, can, in some way or another, be made ... maybe not necessarily with Arduinos, but it can with electronics. :slight_smile: Welcome to the wonderful world of Arduino though.

As for your idea, on paper it's fairly easy. You need to break it down into it's respected pieces though:

First, you want an RGB LED to be stand-alone : easy, wire it up to a small LiPo battery (rechargeable at that!)
Next, you want to be able to control that LED : also easy, put an IC with it that tells it what to do.
Third, you want to be able to send commands to it : this involves adding a wireless unit of sorts, RF is cheap for what you're doing.

So for that part of the project, you're looking at an LED (or a cluster), the necessary resistors to drive it/them at current, an IC to control it/them, and an RF unit which will interface with the same IC, and of course the battery. That's on the receiving end of things.

For the sending part, while you could certainly hack a wireless router to interface with an Arduino and send commands for you, you can also use the same RF units as on the LEDs, as a transmitter. For example, the nRF24L01+ Transceiver is a great choice for this. You can get them as cheap as $4.99 depending where you shop.

All that's left is coding it all up. Essentially, each LED will be a node with a unique address. You can tell the transmitting unit which node to send a command to and you then change that one LED, or several if you want.

In that same spirit, I'm building essentially the same thing, but in strings. Basically my receiving nodes have two strings of 10 RGB LEDs each on them. I have 15 of those. Then I have one unit, dubbed master, which transmits a command to all the rest, telling them what sequence of light show they should be displaying (the sequences are pre-programmed on each node.) They're being made for a night parade in a week a half, 16 kids will be wearing the strings. This should be fun.

I designed my own board because I wanted the RF module to mate with it, so I had to break out the necessary pins from the IC to do that. And I made it with a specific enclosure in mind, so it's 1.875" x 1.125". The stubby RF antenna sticks out one side. Creating your own board might be a little over your head at this stage in the game. Not a bad time to start thinking about it though. CrossRoads offered a great starter board right there for you.

Awesome gents. Thanks for the feedback, i'm going to have to do a little more research but this is an excellent basepoint.

Thanks!