PICAXE Sweetdreams Light



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(click image for better view)

This is a nightlight that projects color changing patterns on the ceiling.  It is a pleasant companion for kids to use when drifting off to sleep at night. 

The whole build is pretty simple, but here are some misc comments and observations:
  • The light has 3 modes:  red/green/blue color changing with fade to black, red/green/blue without black fade, and random color fading
  • The lamp shuts off and goes into low power mode after about 20 minutes of use
  • Because the sleep mode of the PICAXE is optimized to use very little power (eg, nanowatts), the microcontroller is continuously running.  When the light is off, it still polls the push button to know when it has been turned on.  Battery life of the light is almost the shelf life of the batteries.
  • The light flashes to indicate mode (eg, mode 2=2 flashes).  The flash color indicates the battery voltage.  Designed to use 3 AA cells, blue=good, red=low (<3.45v).  The M2 devices now have reference voltage routines, which are really handy for measuring supply voltage.
  • The circuit and program are really just a color blending RGB LED with a timer routine.  The new PICAXE M2 devices have multitasking and timer routines built in, which makes this a pretty easy project.
  • The color blending routines would be a bit complicated to do via bit-banging the RGB outputs.  But the 20M2 used in this project has 3 pulse-width modulated outputs.  These makes RGB control pretty simple. 
  • The transparency mask is at the top of this page.  You can edit it in GIMP to do almost anything you'd want.  From my work with computer generated holograms, I've done quite a bit of testing of laser-printer transparencies.  For the sweetdreams light, almost any transparency will do.  Printing method (laser vs ink-jet) is not critical, either.  You will notice some small aberrations on the projected images: 
    • diffraction:  fuzziness around the edges of the shapes
    • color-banding:  the red/green/blue shadows are slightly misaligned due to the physical separatoin of these LEDs within the superflux packaging.  This causes some rainbow effects at the edges of the projected shapes

The Sweetdreams Light in action:
 
The light is housed in a decorated beach bucket purchased for $0.50 at a dollar store.  Bubble-wrap is used to hold the batteries and circuit-board in place.  The superflux RGB LED is a very bright light source, and cheaply available via ebay.  But there's no reason that 3 separate LEDs couldn't be used.  If you go this route, you'll probably want to comment out the blended projection modes, since misalignment of the discrete LEDs will cause overlapping projections of different colors.

The following schematic/layout drawing was generated from this file using PEBBLE (Picaxe Electronic Bread Board Layout Emulator - V3.1).

schematic

(click to enlarge)

Parts count:

  • 1 PICAXE 20M2 microcontroller
  • 1 Superflux RGB LED
  • 1 normally open momentary contact pushbutton switch
  • 2 resistors (10K, and 22K; for in-circuit programming)
  • 1 3-pin programming header
  • misc: wire, DIP socket, a battery holder, veroboard
  • Children's beach bucket
  • Transparency mask

My schematic is above, and here is the code.  My style/documentation is pretty rigorous, but I strongly advocate good coding practice regardless of the machine; all software only becomes more obfuscated over time.



This code is explicitly released under the GPL. And this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.  

Write me if you find this project interesting. Link to this page if you find it relevant..

Warning, may cause loss of time. This project is provided without any warranty and probably isn't suitable for anything.

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