In the past I’ve blogged about my Alfa-Zeta flip dots (one, two) and how I got them working with the Arduino platform. I’ve taken some time to turn the work into a consumable library that should make it much easier for others who want a turn-key way to drive the display.
The library is available in the Arduino IDE as well as the PlatformIO registry and comes with examples to get started. When added to a project it’ll grab all its dependencies so you can get going as quickly as possible.
Most of the heavy lifting is done by the excellent Adafruit GFX Library and it’s been updated to support 7×7 and 14×7 panels in addition to 28×7. Flip on! 🔴
I’m starting to dust off some seasonal projects and realized I hadn’t made this simple tool public which others may find handy. With projects like the NeoPixel Tree it can be much quicker to code visual sequences locally instead of waiting for new firmware to upload to the MCU every time you want to tweak something.
I first want to acknowledge that I did the thing that I try to never do: I showed off a snazzy project, left some hints here and there of how it worked, said I would follow up with full details… and never did. That’s lame.
I’ve had multiple people reach out for more info and I’m glad they did, since that’s pushed me to finally get some repos public and this belated follow-up written. Apologies!
To jump straight to it, I’ve published these two repos:
Let’s first go over the hardware involved. The most important piece, of course, is the Alfa-Zeta XY5.
In my case, the 14×28 board was made up of two 7×28 panels connected together via RJ-11.
The panels are pricey, but they can be thought of as “hardware easy-mode”. Alfa-Zeta has done the hard job building the controller that drives the hardware and all we have to do is supply power and an RS-485 signal that abides by their protocol.
If you purchase a panel from them there are two important documents to request:
The main manual that describes the specs, features, and things like the DIP switch settings.
The protocol for sending commands to the controllers (which is really simple).
These can easily found by searching around, but if you own a panel the company should supply them. Most of the protocol can be deduced by looking at open source code.
At the moment there isn’t much to it – you can either compile the firmware to run in a mode that writes data from UDP packets to the board, or you can draw “locally” using Adafruit GFX methods.
See the README in the repo above for more details.
Semi-interestingly I utilized Adafruit GFXagain, this time via swift-gfx-wrapper to draw to the board over UDP. It’s hacky and experimental, but that’s part of the fun.
See the README in the repo above for more details.
Something I should’ve done long ago – enabling OTA (Over The Air) firmware updates so I don’t have to disassemble the project box and move the tree every time I want to change its code.
This weekend the NeoPixel tree got many much-needed updates!
Though I have more ideas to implement, the basics of what I wanted to do are complete, like sending commands remotely.
What we can currently do:
Set the brightness
Change the color
Turn the pixels off
Run some built-in sequences, like a nice rainbow
Set repeating color patterns
Set individual pixels
I also threw together a really quick iOS app to set the color with SwiftUI’s built-in ColorPicker view. Thanks to the Rover project (another one that’s been neglected), I had some UDP client code I could borrow to speed up development.
Changing the color of the tree with a SwiftUI ColorPicker view.
I realize this post may be useful to about three other people in the world, but sharing is caring.
What I wanted to do
On my Windows 11 machine I wanted to be able to write and upload firmware to an Arduino Pro Micro (Leonardo) using PlatformIO.
The standard way to accomplish this is to install PlatformIO in VSCode for Windows and you’re done. However, I’m a bit of long time *nix user and really like my PlatformIO + Git workflow in that environment.
WSL sounds like a great option for this case, but unfortunately from what I’ve read, serial communication doesn’t play too nicely without a bunch of hoops to jump through.
To keep things (somewhat) simple I installed a Linux VM through VirtualBox and added a USB Device Filter for the attached Arduino Leonardo so it would be forwarded and accessible by PlatformIO. Using VSCode as my editor would still be possible thanks to its awesome remote features.
I saw flip dots (also called flip discs) last year for the first time and instantly knew I needed some in my life. If you’re not familiar with them, check out how they work!
The particular model I have is the ALFAZETA XY5, which may be the easiest way to get up and running, but certainly not the least expensive.
After getting the board, all you need is:
24V power supply
Something that talks over RS485 (in my case I used an ESP8266 connected to a MAX3485 board)
Their documentation that defines the controller data protocol
I plan to write in more detail how it all works, but for this demo the stack is:
Currently a work in progress, I’ve nerd sniped myself to get TCP/IP working over SLIP with a pair of Arduinos equipped with nRF24L01+ radios.
Once again I’ve nerd sniped myself to spend way too much time on a project that won’t do a lot, yay!
I’d heard about TCP/IP communication via SLIP and wanted to see if I could accomplish this wirelessly with Arduinos equipped with the nRF24L01+ radio. pic.twitter.com/ZI1Bg1JRaZ
