Taken a while, but im getting there with the Arduino and LED side of things

So yeah, turns out learning electronics isnt as easy as I first thought it would be. The thing I have found most difficult has been the parts, I have now got three seperate things wrong simply through not fully understanding exatcly what things were etc....

I have now managed to build a HSV or HSL (depending on which you prefer) LED controller for my lightstrip, through following a tutroial here -

LED HSV Fade Controller

And here are the results.... I had a few issues in loading up the arduino... For some reason the COM porting was wrong at first and again, through inexperience it took me a while to figure out.

I have been playing around with the code and I have figured out how to change loop times of the fade through colours... Although inexplicably the red LED seems to just stay on through the cycle, going to be trying to figure that out tomorrow.

Having said that, hopefully my 880 pin breadboard arrives and I can forget about this and gett on with the audio reactivity!

Anyways, here are some photos from this little side project. It has definately helped in terms of building my confidence with electronics. For example, I have stripped a 12v power supply back to bare wires and am using it for prototyping. I have never really done anything like this beffore, so frankly its a miracle I didnt violently electrocute myself. Still plenty of time to go though! ;)

These still dont show it very well, but the arduino is controlling the light cycle of the He Saturation and "Value", which you can think of as intensity. The resulting effect isnt quite audio reactivity, but for my first shot at electronics, Im pretty happy.

Now that my confidence is there, hopefully I can complete the reactive project, although it is slightly more complex!

ORDERED :D

So that's it done, finally all parts are ordered and paid for, so now I just have to wait for them to arrive!

Here is a parts list of what I have ordered, followed by my invoices for them from Amazon and Proto-Pic

1 x 220K ohm resistor

1 x 0.01uf Capacitor (50V)

2 x 0.1uf Capacitor (50V)

1 x 33pf Capacitor

3 x N Channel Mosfet 60V 16A

2 x Headphone Jack Input

1 x Gate Button

1 x 1K Ohm Potentiometer

1 x LED RGB 5M Light Strip, with power supply included.

2 x MSGEQ7 Frequency Splitting Chip

1 x Plug and Play Breadboard.

TOTAL: £70.79

The rest of the reciept from Amazon is very boring, I can assure you! Turns out the order actually consists of items from 9 seperate companies! Great :3

Here is confirmation of the Arduino and MSGEQ7 from Proto-Pic.

As you can see, the Arduino was unfortunately out of stock, however I emailed them asking when it would be back in and was assured it would next week. So not long!

The price may seem quite steep, however I have bought enough components to account for both speakers, so some aspects have had to have double the amount bought.

The longest it is saying I have to wait for some of the products is mid March, which is not ideal. However the Arduino, LED strip and MSGEQ7, which are all the key players in the project, will be here by mid next week. This means that while audio reactivity in the way I intend still lays just around the corner, I can certainly get started with experimenting with working in static colour and changing colour environments.

The next task for me is going to be doing some designs of how I intend to implement the system into a studio. The working idea currently is that I am going to be attaching the strips around the left, top and right sides of my monitor speakers. These will then be covered with a curved, frosted sheet of perspecs (is that how you spell it!?). Anyways, pictures of that to follow.