Atmosphere Powered BLE Light Tie

Ever needed your tie to react to twitter, running, or, the beat? No... Well we did it anyway! Using Atmosphere I made a BLE light tie!

kieron.gillespie

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Description

Using a black tie and some APA102 led strips with a tinytile from element14 and Anaren's Atmosphere we created a interactive LED animation board app to let us control it in a number of ways.

Details

So a list of the components and where you can find them,

A tinytile from element14 powered by the Intel Curie chip set
About a meter worth of APA102 LED Strip
A USB Power Bank, anyone will do smaller the better
An Atmosphere Account register here
Load the LED Animation project here

So the build is pretty straight forward. The example provided by the Atmosphere wiki is using 18 LEDs for the tie example. You can increase this in the project. The APA102s are communicated to via SPI from the tinytile board. Connecting the SPI MOSI line to the DI pin on the light strips and then the SPI clock line to the CI pin will allow the tinytile to send the APA102 LED frame packets to the strip. You will also want to connect the 5V line on the tinytile to the LED strips VCC pin and also the GND pin to ground. You should note the the LED strips can draw quite a bit of amperage so I would advise trying to run too many off of a simple USB batter. 18 LEDs seems to work well.

Components

1 × tinytile
1 × APA102 LED Light Strip
1 × Portable USB Battery Pack

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Other things we can do with this
kieron.gillespie • 06/19/2017 at 15:40 • 0 comments

So I have been thinking more about what I could use this project for. I have already created a lanyard version of the led strips as well. Some other thoughts I have is maybe trying to add an RTC component where you can have it brighten up at certain times of the day or change it's color through out the day.
Another thing I would like to do is connect the device to the cloud to get weather data and have it change it's color based on the weather outside. If the LED array was larges I might even try to do animations, like snow falling, or sun shine rays.