We submitted our project proposal and sorted out some issues with the proposal with Nathan regarding the fact that PWM is not a serial interface. Ultimately Nathan agreed that interfacing with the LED Strip would count as a serial interface onto itself. We are now ready to start the project!

This week, we focused on deciding which materials we will use, as well as purchasing said materials. We decided on using the 16.4 ft, 12V LED Strip with 300 LEDs, which we both ordered on Amazon. We also got a 12V DC 3A Power Supply to power the LED Strip.

We now have all the necessary hardware to start formally working on the project this weekend (hopefully!)

This week, we worked both on converting musical beats to a visual representation via code and on programming the LED strip.

The current program takes in music/sounds through the microphone and represents the various frequencies of the sound with ascii characters, with the colors indicating the intensity of the sound. We observed several songs and we decided to limit the range of frequencies from 0-300 MHz which would capture the sub-bass, bass, and some of the low midrange frequencies.

In regard to programming the LED strip, we made the calculations for the PWM waveforms in order to send information from the microcontroller to the LED strip.

This week, we continued working on the program that converts musical beats and on the PWM waveforms for the LED strip. We also purchased a Quad Level-Shifter (pictured on the left) to facilitate converting the 3.3 V output of our microcontroller to the 5 V input that the LED strip requires.

Now, the converting program takes in music/sounds through the microphone and converts the 0-300 MHz frequencies of the sound to numerical data. Now that data can be sent to the microcontroller to control the LED strip.

In regard to programming the LED strip, we programmed the required PWM waveforms in order to turn the LED strip on, but currently it is not as precise as we need it to be because of the high frequency. So we will further examine DMA and how we can best use it in controlling the LED strip.