What I wanted to learn, and why it interested me: I wanted to do LED Strips as I often build mini-dioramas, and I want to learn how to incorporate multiple LED Strips into projects I do. For instance, I built the temple of time from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and I wanted to incorporate illuminating flowers in the build, but I was unsure how to rig it all together. Hopefully, by going through this domain-specific building project, I can learn how to rig things up in a smaller manner and be able to incorporate light into more of my future projects.

Process and reflection: 

This project was fairly simple initially. I interpreted the multiple data streams for the creative project portion as having two colors collide and not necessarily being controlled via a potentiometer. However, I had about an hour to make the shift from the colors being hardcoded into being controlled by a potentiometer, which was quite stressful. I ran into some issues and debugging the code took a majority of the time, as I was able to ask ChatGBT for some of the coding help as I knew generally how I wanted to do it, but not exactly (very thankful ChatGPT was alloweved for this project as theres no way I coudlve changed it in the time I had left without it). One thing I really focused on in this project was doing soldering first and early, as I cut soldering from project 1 due to time constraints. Soldering for the first time was terrifying, and having the ground wire rip out once I finished (resulting in me going back and resoldering it) was quite annoying. Overall, this project was helpful in me learning more about soldering, LED Strips, and even indirectly wiring up potentiometers and getting those to work, as I did not use those in project 1.

//60-223 Intro to Physical Computing, Spring 2026

   //Domain-specific Skill Building exercise: LED Strip: Andy Mann

  // The project here is an LED Strip that connects to my computer, where, when it is there is a blue LED signal coming from the left and a red signal from the right, and they each grow and then shrink. When an LED is registered as both blue and yellow, it outputs a yellow signal. The signal itself in my project is being controlled by the Potentiometer.

   //Pin mapping:

   //Arduino pin | role  | details

  // ------------------------------

  // 2          output   LED_DataPin button

  // A0         input    Potentiometer

//number of LED pins I used was 16  

#include <Adafruit_NeoPixel.h>

const int LED_DATA_PIN = 2;

const int NUM_LEDS = 16;

const int POT_PIN = A0;

Adafruit_NeoPixel leds(NUM_LEDS, LED_DATA_PIN, NEO_GRB + NEO_KHZ800);

void setup() {

Serial.begin(9600);     // for debugging

leds.begin();

leds.clear();

leds.setBrightness(150); // brightness level

leds.show();

}

void loop() {

// Read potentiometer

int potValue = analogRead(POT_PIN);

// Map to number of LEDs

int size = map(potValue, 0, 1023, 0, NUM_LEDS);

// Print debug info

Serial.print("Pot: ");

Serial.print(potValue);

Serial.print("  Size: ");

Serial.println(size);

// Left and right bars

int leftSize = size;

int rightSize = size;

for (int i = 0; i < NUM_LEDS; i++) {

  bool leftActive  = (i < leftSize);

  bool rightActive = (i >= NUM_LEDS - rightSize);

  if (leftActive && rightActive) {

    // overlap = yellow

    leds.setPixelColor(i, leds.Color(255, 255, 0));

  }

  else if (leftActive) {

    // left bar = red

    leds.setPixelColor(i, leds.Color(255, 0, 0));

  }

  else if (rightActive) {

    // right bar = blue

    leds.setPixelColor(i, leds.Color(0, 0, 255));

  }

  else {

    // off

    leds.setPixelColor(i, leds.Color(0, 0, 0));

  }

}

leds.show();

delay(20);

}