Making an interactive art work, with 500 to 800 Addressable LEDS hooked up to 3 Xbox Kinects. Any recommendations on what Ardunio components one would need and any helpful tips from anyone who tried something similar before.
Note: I'm pretty comfortable with programming against the Kinect, but have no working knowledge of Ardunio.
Use Arduino to drive a bank of 12 or 13 MAX7219, each can control 64 LEDs with a simple write to one of 8 registers, each register controls 8 LEDs. Can be daisy chained also.
I use SPI.transfer to send data to them, the MAX7219 takes care of the multiplexing to drive the LEDs.
For example, to update one MAX7219, this little loop would do it:
for (x=0; x<8; x=x+1){
digitalWrite (ssPin,LOW);
SPI.transfer (x+1); // send out register address, from 1 to 8
SPI.transfer(dataArray[x]); // send out data stored in an array
digitalWrite (sspin, HIGH);
}
Maybe use library such as parola to control the MAX7219s for scrolling, etc.
https://parola.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest
Talk between Kinect and Arduino with Serial messages?
I have a little breakout board that will let you break out the wiring to the LEDs pretty easily, there's a demo of it working also here
http://www.crossroadsfencing.com/BobuinoRev17/
You will have to program the Kinect on your laptop.
If it must be stand alone then the Arduino Yun is a hybrid system with a Unix processor and an embedded processor that might be possible to use with a Kinect.
How big is the installation? Driving that many LEDs might be tricky. I would use addressable LED strips.
Only problem with LED strips is that you're limited on the spacing between LEDs.
Also stuck with RGB LEDs, I don't think I've ever seen addressable monocolor strips.
Higher power needed also, up to 60mA per 3 LEDs vs MAX7219 where only 8 LEDs are on at any 1 time out of 64 - but they can be really bright LEDs (impacted by viewing angle - and the installation might have diffuser effect, so not so critical?).
Find an e-bay supplier to supply them with needed length wire leads and 2-pin connector, plug them into a breakout board.
Power calculation example:
0.6A/meter, 60 LEDs/meter
(5000 LEDs/60 LED/meter) * 0.6A/meter => 50A supply!
Likely need to use several and spread them out.
As with all engineering, everything is a tradeoff.