Glow

Home Decor (ish) - Ambient Lighting (ish) - Real World Information (ish)

BeginnerFull instructions provided7,789

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B

Adafruit 24-Channel 12-bit PWM LED Driver - TLC5947

Note: all you really need is the TLC5947 chip, but this board gives a nice interface to it.

Bright LED - RGB Diffused Common Anode

You need one LED for each object you want to light. In this project I needed 5; one for each ball.

4 Channel 22 AWG Wire

You can use whatever here, but this is the best I could find to match my white walls. This one wire has 4 wires running in it, so you can run one wire to each LED and control all of the colors.

Jumper wires (generic)

It is always helpful for playing around to have some jumper cables. For example https://www.adafruit.com/products/826./

Official Raspberry Pi WiFi Dongle

You only need this if you want to have WiFi for your Pi. Note: currently Windows IOT only supports this adapter, so if you want WiFi get this one!

Software apps and online services

Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Core

Hand tools and fabrication machines

Soldering iron (generic)

Story

Glow

Glow is a simple home décor (ish), ambient lighting (ish), real-time information (ish) system. The idea came from some paper lanterns we had hanging in our house as decoration for our engagement party. I thought it would be cool to put RGB LEDs in each ball and see what I could do with color. I wanted the whole project to be very smooth, flowing, and animated -- which I discovered was rather difficult to achieve with a Pi – so I wrote a number of software libraries with the Pi 2 and RGB LEDs.

Since Glow is also smart and connected to the internet, we can do interesting things like show the weather on the objects, flash for notifications, or whatever you can think of.

Glow is really just a simple platform to smoothly control LEDs with a Raspberry Pi and a Windows based device -- once you have it setup the possibilities are endless!

Hardware Setup

The Adafruit 24-Channel 12-bit PWM LED Driver has easy to access in and out data pins for SPI. In my project, I soldered header connector pins to the board so I could easily mount it on a breadboard. The TLC5947 pins are latch, blackout, clock, data in, ground, and v+. This project uses everything but the blackout pin; when the blackout pin is set high it will disable all of the outputs on the board, which we don’t need. The ground and V+ should be connected to the Pi’s ground and 5V, the latch should be put on any open GPIO pin (I used GPIO 6), and the data and clock should be put on the Pi’s SPI pins. You can see my hardware setup in the image below.

1 / 8 • The PWM Chip

The TLC5947 chip works as a current sink so the single common pin on the LEDs can be connected to the V+ and each RGB color pin on the LED can be connected in one of the numbed holes on the board. This chip has 24 slots which can support 8 RBG LEDs. I originally soldered the wires directly to the board, but found that was very hard to work with so I went out and got nice little header connectors to allow me to quickly add and remove the LEDs. The connectors also work well on the LED connecting end of the wire; the female header connectors create a solid connection for the LEDs to sit in.

Last but not least, you need to find some way to hang or suspend the LEDs into the objects your lighting up. If you have defused LEDs, they do a decent job at spreading out the light but you might also want to consider wrapping them in something for more diffusion as they do have a high light output on the bottom.

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Software Setup

Clone Glow locally from GitHub. The project is a Windows Universal App so it requires Visual Studio 2015 and Windows 10.

Deploy Glow on the Pi and deploy the Glow app on a tablet, desktop, or phone. Once Glow is running on the Pi and the Pi is connected to the network, all you should have to do is open the app on a device connected to the same network and the app will find the Pi and connect to it.