A Hexagonal Animated Mood (or Night) Light

As Ben Rowland puts it, he has "a fascination that borders on obsession with light,” so he naturally decided to "create a selection of small modular PCBs that could be used to create RGB light displays of any size.” One such display, an animated hexagonal mood light, is comprised of a half-dozen 4 x 4 WS2812B LED panels arranged around its circumference and diffused through a 3D-printed surface. He also made a much larger 8 x 8 x 6 panel design, which, while not shown in the demo video, looks brilliant in its write-up pictures.

To control the lamp assembly, he first tried out an Arduino Nano. While this worked, he wanted to add more functionality, so created a custom driver PCB. His new design employs a PIC24FJ256GA702 as the main controller and includes an ESP8266 for WiFi connectivity.

A phototransistor lets it scale light up or down depending on ambient conditions, and it features power supply monitoring to ensure it doesn’t try to pull too much current. There’s even an I2C connector, as well as a “future expansion connector,” so this system should be able to handle whatever Rowland decides to throw at it.

Firmware was developed using Flowcode, and the PIC micorcontroller was programmed with a PICkit 3. A variety of animations are seen in the clip below, so be sure to check it out for lighting inspiration!