I started my working life as an apprentice learning the art of electronics. Back then it was mainly simple stuff, starting off with the very basics learning about the functions of electronic components and going on to make stuff that had some useful purpose or other. It gave me a great basis for building a useful career that took me all round the world and made me a good living, it helped me start my own business and then allowed me to take life much more easily and slowly from my mid 40's. Life took me in a different direction from there but just recently I have somehow had my interest rekindled and decided I needed to get back into the world of electronics. That passion was further stirred when I was tidying out my workshop and found a light display that I had built when I was about 20 - some 40 years ago.
When my Mrs asked me what I wanted for Christmas the choice was easy, a load of electronics stuff off of Temu - the super cheap Chinese tat store. I gave her a list of things and sure enough on Christmas day there they all were, some useful extra bits too, it was a most splendid day. Since I had given her my wish list I had done a ton of research to try and bring myself up to date and had concluded that the days of complex circuits with dozens of discrete integrated circuits were well and truly over and the days of sophisticated programmable controllers were very much here. Further research suggested that I needed to buy a thing called an Arduino Uno and to learn how to program it. This was a problem, my brain doesn't work like a programmer's, it never has. When I was working in the telecom industry I had to program the interactive voice response systems, which I could do but not do well. Whenever I wrote code it was roundly criticized by the pointy headed spectacle wearing nasally voiced geeks that could do that stuff with their eyes closed. My God, how I hated them :-) My code was always a mess and never something that you could say was of merchantable quality so I did what any sensible person would do, I gave up.
So that's a bit of background, now between Christmas 2024 and New Year 2025 was the time to really get started and come to terms with this brave new world. Being old things have taken longer to sink in than they would have done 40 years ago, I am also working alone with nobody to guide me so getting started from cold and understanding the lingo has been fraught at times but progress is being made. In fact from getting my first Arduino delivered to loading up all the software on my PC, getting the two talking and making it do it's first job was a matter of minutes rather than hours. That first job was turning an led on and off, which may sound pathetically boring and simple but it requires the understanding of quite a few essential basic principles to do it. I had got cocky by now and decided I needed to turn 3 leds on and off in a sort of chasing sequence, again very simple but it worked and allowed me to prove to myself that I might just be able to do this. I have since discovered that the way I did it was not good practice, it took me right back to my IVR programming days. Fortunately various prolific youtube creators showed me the right way to do it rather than laughing at me like those bastards did 30 years ago. I'm not bitter.
These controllers are nothing short of incredible, I have sort of moved on now to another thing called an ESP32, it's kind of like an Arduino on acid, amphetamines, cocaine and kryptonite or something. It has masses more memory, a dual core processor, much better capabilities all round and it's much, much faster. Unbelievably it can be purchased for about the same price as a pint of beer. I bought 3 of them and a pretty decent LCD display from Temu for just over 15 quid, it's crazy.
Anyway I thought I needed a decent little project to get my head around so decided that my mate really should have a decent light display for the American themed diner at his bowling alley - Boston Bowl. They used to have red neon tubes in there but a couple had blown so they had asked me to have a look at them, I suggested using some red led strips instead as they would be far cheaper. He had asked me then if I could do multi colour but I had no idea at the time how to do that, other than some really basic fixed pattern. This all came together and I set out to use my new found skills to make something interesting and cool.
In my research I had come across these things called neo pixels - they are strips of little chips that contain 3 led's - one red, one blue and one green, they are controlled by a serial data stream. By sending a 3 x 8 digit string to each of the led's you can get any colour you want, by varying the brightness of each of the 3 led's. So if you were to send, for example 255,0,0 that would turn the red led on to full brightness while leaving the blue and green turned off. Send 0,255.0 and you turn the blue full on, 0,0,255 turns the led green, mix them about and you can produce any colour you want. The really clever bit, though is how you can talk to hundreds of thousands of these neo pixels individually. Without getting too in depth what happens is you send a serial data stream that has 3 bytes for every led, eg if you have 300 neo pixels you would send 900 bytes each time you update the string. Each neo pixel has a data in and a data out. Each one strips the first 3 bytes, then sends the rest of the string on to the next led in the string, so led 1 gets 900 bytes, led 2 gets 897, led 3 gets 894 etc etc. Each Byte tells the pixel what brightness each of it's 3 led's need to be and things start to get interesting. My first program just turned one led on, then the next, then the next until I had one led running the length of my 5 meter long 300 pixel string. The next program added in some colour change, then I added some brightness change and then I started putting effects together. It was about then I discovered much cleverer people than me had already done a lot of this and had created libraries of code that could be used by anybody to create incredible displays very, very easily and quickly. The advantage of that to me is that it is done the right way rather than the wrong way and it is helping me to learn.
There is a long, long way to go and writing even the simplest of things takes me ages, it's all written in c++and I am struggling a bit with my aged brain but I am getting there. I have a development kit that has loads of modules to allow me to try all sorts of projects, most of which don't use led's, you can run stepper motors, dozens of different input modules, digital or analogue outputs and because the ESP32 has built in wifi and bluetooth you can do all sorts of remote control type stuff. The possibilities are endless and only constrained by your imagination. Really incredible stuff.
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