Objectives Complete!

as I touched on at the end of my last post, I have manged to get my electronics working properly, so now I have my very own colour organ in my room. Advancing on the last post I made, after I got the desired signal from the MSGEQ7 chip, I set about contructing the LED circuit. Up until now, I have been trying to get everything working on one breadboard. This time I decided to split the two breadboards, as I have two... See my earlier posts for how that happened!

If you enlarge this image, you will see that the right hand BB is looking after the EQ circuit, and the left is the LED's. I have also routed the Resistors and Capacitors straight to the power rails and swapped the pin arrangement back to the original advised config from J.Skoba.

In testing it I have also discovered some advancements in the code that could be made, mostly to do with clearing low level distortion from the MSGEQ7 and improving the refresh rate in order to make the colour definition more obvious. These haven't been massively technical or difficult, but they have made a obvious difference to the performance.

I wonder if it is ecause when this code was first written the power of the Arduino Duende wasn't that of the Duo. Basically though, the refresh rate for the MSGEQ7, which is controlled by the strobe and reset pin via the arduino, was set to 80 milliseconds. This was ok, however lowering this to below 30 milliseconds has vastly improved it. this allows for a refresh rate of around 31 frames (equiv) a second. I have just been very happy with its performance since then, however I will continue to lower this amount. Hopefully the modern arduino can drive the MSGEQ7 at a refresh rate of > 10 milliseconds.

The original code used a filter set at a value of 80 to filter out MSGEQ7 distortions, which range roughly between 50-80. I did however notice when monitoring this through the Serial COM that it sometimes creeps upto as high as 86-87... I have found you can nearly completely elliminate these using a filter value of 90 instead. Occasionally I am still seeing some blue flashes on the LED at a really low level, but I am going to put this down to a ghost in the machine; when I monitor the Serial COM, there are no numerical values above 90 happening that correspond to the slight flashing. And when I say slight, when it is placed behind something, it isn't enough light to even notice, even in pitch black. Its only if you actually look directly at the LED strip you notice it.

Another note for anyone building this with no knowledge of electronics, N Channel MOSFETs are tempremental. At first, I thought there was a massive error with what I was doing, I was getting extreme flashing on the blue channel, even with no five volt feed. With the transistors in, this should mean even if your 12volt is connected, you will get nothing through. I swapped out the MOSFET and changed nothing else, everything was fine. I had read elsewhere that they can often be faulty. Buy more than you need, Id say 10 is a good number. Once you have one of these systems, you will want more anyways... ;)

Once the light goes down this evening, I am going to take a video of a few tunes to show it in full effect! In that post I will also include my idea for how I am actually going to implement this. Funnily, we will be going back to diffusion, but this time light diffusion. Considerably easier to implement the its acoustic cousin!

After that, we will be going back to the acoustic diffuser build, as I can now afford the Gorilla Glue I need to get it done. then I will be able to get my analysis of the final system done and complete my dissertation.