To connect the joshua bus with the computer I designed a Rs-485 to Usb interface. It’s based on the Ftdi 232BM, so the design was easy to do. The interface is used for debugging and remote firmware update of the Joshua bus nodes.
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For some mood lighting in the living room I mounted a lot of rgb leds in the cabinet. Rgb leds will be driven with 3 pwm channels on a Atmel mega-128. Controlling will be taken care of by the Joshua Bus .
Testing the leds:
For a nice fading it’s necessary that the fading will work like figure 2. In figure 1 all colors are increased every step with the same value, the disadvantage of this is that blue is finished first, software is easy to make. In figure 2 all colors are finished the same time, the step size for all colors is different. I wrote a routine that will take care of this.
Nice fading example:
Update: Replaced the ledstrips. The old strips had 3 leds for the colors, separated Red, green and blue led. This was not mixing very well and because the strips are close to the wall you could see the individual colors on the wall.
Placed now new strips with RGB led’s in 1 package.
After building a 3″ touchscreen for the Joshua bus i decided to make a 5″ touchscreen for the livingroom.
The problem with electronics is that continues changes, touchscreen not available anymore. Find a new supplier with nice priced screens Ledsee.com . Screen has a compleet new pin assigment so we must design a new pcb and some minor software changes.
See the touchscreen in action, take a note of the moving buttons.
This is the (almost) the same dimmer as the dinnertable dimmer for the Joshua Bus . This version is compacter due the use of smd components.
