Keith Williamson's OpenRocket LED Controller with Customized User Interface

from hackster.io

It has always been fun covering art lighting projects from the maker community. Embedded developer Keith Williamson has designed an LED controller that incorporates the powerful Teensy 4.0, offering a customized user interface to play with the different colors and parameters of the LED lights.

The board integrates a 32/64-bit floating-point math unit that is useful for lighting effects that employ complex math functions, making it the ideal choice for the LED controller. More importantly, the onboard microcontroller does not support any wireless communication like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, which might be a downside for a lighting project. However, Williamson plans to develop a mobile application that could communicate with the hardware via a Bluetooth interface.

The schematic of the OpenRocket LED controller shows the board requiring three different voltages: 12V, 5V, and 3V3. The highest voltage level of 12V is directly taken from an external power supply unit that goes to the addressable LED and PWM outputs. However, the 5V is converted from a 12V supply using a high-efficiency switching regulator circuit while the 3.3V is taken from the output pin on the microcontroller.

Even when the selected microcontroller did not provide a microSD card capability, Williamson decided to add the microSD card reader using the four SPI signals (MOSI, MISO, SCK, CS) directly from the T4 microcontroller. Using the integrated RTC to track time and date, the OpenRocket LED controller includes a socketed CR2032 coin battery to keep it operational. For automation projects that require detection of the human body, the passive infrared sensor is used that operates over a wide voltage range of 4.5 to 20V.

For more details on other features and the firmware, check out the OpenRocket's project page.