Animatable-LED-Hat

Battery operated, LED matrix hat that can be programmed to display interesting designs.

Demo and Build Instructions

Click the gif for a link to the video or read the full writeup for this project on hackster.io

Setup Guide

In order to upload the code to your board, make sure you've completed the following steps:

Open the led_hat.ino file from the led_hat folder with the Arduino IDE.

Add the Adafruit AVR boards through the board manager. This Adafruit guide shows you how to install support for AVR boards.

Install the Adafruit Neopixel library through the Library Manager (Sketch -> Include Library-> Manage Libraries...). I used version 1.0.6, but newer versions should work as well.

Make sure you select the correct board port under the Tools menu. I selected Tools-> Board: Adafruit Flora and Tools-> Port -> /dev/{some port with usb}

Click Upload to upload the code on your board.

If the code fails to upload on your board, try switching the port in the tools menu.

Modifying the Code

All of the animation functions are called in the main loop at the end of the file (void loop()). You can add or remove functions here to display different effects.

Function List

drawShape

void drawShape(byte shape[], uint32_t color, boolean flash, int cycles, int delayTime) {

Displays a shape of the selected color on the matrix. In general, shapes are loaded onto the LED matrix through byte arrays. At the top of the program, I have a couple predefined shapes. Each row corresponds to a byte in the array. A value of 1 means the pixel should be on, 0 means it should be off. Each byte is loaded in from the bottom to the top and from the right side to the left. Therefore, a byte array with the value byte arr[] = {B10000000, B10000000, B10000000, B10000000, B10000000, B10000000, B10000000, B10000000}; will have lit pixels only on the rightmost column.

• uint32_t color is an RGB color value.
• boolean flash flashes the shape.
• int cycles number of times to loop the shape.
• int delayTime delay between cycles in MS.

rainbowShape

void rainbowShape(byte shape[], uint8_t wait)

Similar to drawShape, but will add a rainbow animation.

twoColor

void twoColor(byte shape[], uint32_t color1, uint32_t color2, int cycles, int delayTime)

Similar to drawShape, but all pixels are lit. 1s will be color1, 0s will be color2.

animate

void animate(byte shape[][8], int frames, uint32_t color, int cycles, int delayTime)

Similar to drawShape, but this function displays an animated design. Instead of passing in a single byte array, you can pass in multiple byte arrays that will display sequentially.

• int frames the number of arrays in your 2d byte array.
• uint32_t color an RGB color value for every frame.
• int cycles number of times to loop the animation.
• int delayTime delay between cycles in MS.

rainbowAnimate

void rainbowAnimation(byte shape[][8], int frames, int cycles, int delayTime)

Similar to animate, but changes the color for each frame.