2D Heat Conduction Solver

(Forgive the Walking Dead homage)

I applied some supernatural ways to shrink the final size of our binary down, plan to add a separate section on the hackaday page describing some of the techniques.

We repurposed some old phone cable and soldered up six 10K thermocouples to the LED board. We drilled through the back of the board so the thermistors could sense heat from the front, either from a heat gun or even just touching it with your finger.

A little too late too get much further tonight, but hopefully our board will be glowing soon

The LED matrix is actually made up of 12 smaller (8x8) boards that are connected together. This requires an interesting (painful) algorithm for getting our color map to display correctly.

As Adam stated in 242560:

Because Jordan soldered the LED matrix without care and respect for the
rest of us, a significant amount of mapping has to be done from the
temperature array to the LED layout.

Adam made a decent attempt, but didn't quite get it right. It also took him a fair amount of convincing that his algorithm was junk, but a few tests and a final working solution put us all back on track.

Our J-Goulder manufactured LED board has 32x24 LEDs and we definitely want to light the whole thing up with just our spare Arduino Uno. This would normally be no problem, but our transient conduction algorithm requires two arrays at a time (one for the current time step, one for the previous). This kind of pushes our RAM requirements too the limit.

brewlius-cesar thought of a quick way to trim down the fat of our algorithm by keeping only a single row of "previous" values and swapping out the values as we do our radial sweeps for each time step.

We have a repository:

https://github.com/VectorSpaceHQ/2d_conduction

Adam has an idea:

We add a few temperature sensors to each edge of Jordan's led screen. You hold it, and the led colors reflect the temperature around the edge, which is the initial condition. You hit a button, and it acts like a box full of water, showing natural convection driven by the initial edge temperature that you gave it