But it's not packaged to be easily re-programmed for other messages or graphics. So started my sleuthing.. which turned into a fascinating story.
It seems the kit was originally designed and built as a uni project by Zheng Zhong Xing 兴向荣 (aka zhengzhongxing39) studying Control Technology and Instruments/Principles and Applications at a Chinese University. Reportedly "... soldering was troublesome, with lots of changes and no solid basic skills, so burned out the first board" ;-) But it seems persistence paid off, and ended up commercialising the kit and starting electronics business and taobao store where you can find this kit and many others.
As always, all notes, schematics and code are in the Little Arduino Projects repo on GitHub, including my annotation of the source code and schematic for the shake stick.
5 comments:
Fantastic sleuth work, thank you!
I bought a couple of these to decorate my son's bike and you've saved me a lot of time in changing the message - perhaps the difference between a project that's finished, and one that's not... :-)
No problem Leon, happy it helped;-)
If you're sharing any pictures/video of the finished effect on the bike, send me a link? Sounds like it could work quite well.
Hi, say your blog and decided to give it a go, built mine up today and it works, but only the top bank lights.
checked continuity all the way down the common rail - ok, checked evry led to address pin on atmega chip - ok.
could it be a faulty micro controller, can't think of another reason why only 50% of the led's would work?
any ideas from you reverse engineering?
thanks if you can help.
Hi Lewe,
If half of the LEDs are working and the other half not, my first thought is you might have been caught out by the polarity switch.
I caught myself before soldering all the LEDs in - notice that halfway down the stick, the LED orientation is reversed (D1-D8 have cathode to the right, D9-D17 have cathode to the left). If you put them all in the same way, that would explain! If so, should be an easy fix. They just need desoldering and reversing. I doubt you've damaged the LEDs but it would be an idea to tests them all before putting back in.
If that's not the problem, hmm, a bit more puzzling and I don't have any special ideas sorry.
Wow, talk about not seeing the wood for the trees! yep, that's exactly the problem.
Many thanks
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