Baby Room Starscape Projector

Hacker Dad vs Reality

When my son was first born almost a year ago, I had quite a few lofty ideas for DIY baby monitors, servo rockers etc...  Needless to say reality intervened all too quickly and few projects ever had much impact.  That is with the notable exception of the following project...

Cheap Planetarium

When one of the relatives gave us this $10 Night-Sky Projection Kit, I simply had to do something about the dinky little incandescent light bulb and the non-rotating base.

FastLED

Luckily, the timing coincided with the development of a powerful new Arduino library called FastLED which is best known perhaps for efficiently powering wonderfully complex LED animations for the Cheerlights project.  Unlike packages like Adafruit's Neopixel Library, FastLED supports a whole range of different LED types, from the standard analog variety to the popular, digitally addressable Neopixels.

 Thanks to enthusiastic support from the FastLED Google Plus Community I was able to create a stunningly bright light show using a now-defunct Arduino Leonardo-based board called the Visualight.

Visualight

The Visualight was powered directly via USB and included a super-bright LED which was originally meant to be controlled via the XBee-like WiFly Module (remember what it was like before the ESP8266?).

The magic really happened however, once this board was married to the FastLED library as it allowed the Visualight to drive a 16 piece NeoPixel ring at the same time as its native high powered light.

FastLED Magic

As shown in the picture above, this small form factor allowed me to replace the dim light bulb that originally came with the projector with two very powerful animated light sources.

After removing the original battery box, I even had enough room left to install a small stepper motor to give the globe a rotating effect.

The globe then fits over a plastic stem which is attached to the stepper.

The stepper motor required a dedicated controller for which I used an Adafruit Pro Trinket housed in a seperate box. 

The detailed connections are shown in the Fritzing sketch below.  NOTE: Since Fritzing doesn't have a part for the Visualight the actual Fritzing sketch routes the connections through a generic ATMega32u4 breakout board.  The picture below has been modified for visual purposes only.

The image illustrates other components used for power including the barrel-plug terminal adapter and a 5v-USB circuit powering the vi

All electronics are then safely tucked away into an enclosure and the rotating globe is placed in position.

Effect

  The effect is so spectacular that no still image can really do it justice, nor apparently can the video capture capabilities of my Nexus 5...  I will however be sure to update this post with adequate video footage as soon as timing and technology allows.

  If any further proof is necessary however then consider the fact that the projector is still as entertaining to the 1 year old incarnation of my son as it was when he was a newborn!  This is as good an endorsement as one is ever likely to get!

Project Files

The Arduino sketches  for both the LEDs and the stepper motor as well as the fritzing sketches and various images can all be found at the dedicated project repo- https://github.com/Cribstone/babyroomstarscape