This weekend Barry and I found ourselves in a Dollar Tree store– one of the greatest places known to man.

We picked ourselves up some toys to play with, all for a dollar:

That plush guy had the face of a beagle, but the body of a centipede, perfect for segmented lighting! You can also see our prototype, and the weird kaleidoscope plastic things we used in his back.

We named that friendly fellow the Beaglepede, after the obvious portmanteau, and decided to actualize his inner nature: warm and glowing. So we took those weird disco lanterns and a few LEDs  and made the little guy shine.

The code we used can be found down below. Basically it reads from a button, which changes the state between off and glowing each LED in sequence. The circuit is similarly simple, the diagram also can be found below.

Continue for code and schematic…

Here’s the code:

//Code for Mr. Blinkie, AKA the psychedelic beaglepede
//July 17 2010
//Written by Hadley Piper

int state = 0;     // we declare these here so they can be accessed globally, 
int button = 0;    // meaning in different functions.

void wave(){        // this is the function that controlls the light
  int i;
  int j;            // counter variables
          //we put the LED's sequentially in pins 5-9 for looping convenience
  for (i = 5; i< 10; i++){ // i counts the LED pin
    if (digitalRead(button) == HIGH){  //check for button press
      state = 0;
      break;
    }
   if (state == 0) break; //check if button was pressed during inner loop
     for (j = 0; j<=50050; j+=350){ //loop to fade each LED on
     analogWrite(i,j); //set pin i to pwm duty cycle j
      delay(1); //small aesthetic delay
      if (digitalRead(button) == HIGH){ //another check for button press
        state = 0;
        break;
      }
    }
    delay(100); //let the light stay on for a bit
    for (j = 50050; j>=0; j-=350){ //loop to fade each LED off
      analogWrite(i,j); //set pin i to pwm duty cycle j
      delay(1); //small aesthetic delay, again
      if (digitalRead(button) == HIGH){ //last check for button press
        state = 0;
        break;
      }
    }
    delay(100); //third aesthetic delay
  }
}

void setup(){
  pinMode(5, PWM);  //set the LED pins to PWM
  pinMode(6, PWM);
  pinMode(7, PWM);
  pinMode(8, PWM);
  pinMode(9, PWM);
  pinMode(button, INPUT); //set button pin to input
}

void loop(){
  if (state == 0 ){       //turn all LED's off in resting state
    analogWrite(5, 000);
    analogWrite(6, 000);
    analogWrite(7, 000);
    analogWrite(8, 000);
    analogWrite(9, 000);
    if (digitalRead(button) == HIGH){ //check to see if button was pressed
      state = 1;
      delay(500);
      SerialUSB.println("I am the Great BEAGLEPEDE!!"); //a sign of things to come
    }
  }
  if (state == 1){ //if the button is in state 1, call the wave function
    wave();
    if (digitalRead(button) == HIGH){ //check for button press and reset to state 0
      state = 0;
      delay(500);
    }
  }
}

And here’s the schematic:

I’m excited to have the beaglepede around because I think he’s going to be a cool visualizer…there’s lots of things you can do with a row of LEDs!

Bye bye, Beaglepede.