LEGO Apollo Rocket Plume Control Panel
Ben Brooks set out to make an interactive Christmas present for his two-year-old son.
You can make some amazing things with LEGO sets, including a very nice replica of the Apollo spacecraft. Ben Brooks, however, went several steps further, first adding a smoke plume made out of a “snow fluff blanket." This is lit up using a series of RGB LEDs under the control of a Particle Photon, and accompanied by sounds from an Adafruit Audio FX sound board. The device was originally triggered remotely via his phone, or by a simple switch assembly that also uses a Photon.
As cool as that was, Brooks’ single-switch control panel really didn’t do the assembly justice. After setting out to make a Christmas present for his son with lots of lights and switches, he decided to make a panel to control the model rocket assembly. The resulting build is made from a rather impressive 3D-printed housing, with a plethora of switches for control, and a few LEDs for feedback. As with the rest of the system, this unit is powered by a Photon. To accommodate the needed I/O for the project, a number of multiplexers were used here, and Brooks designed a custom PCB for it to avoid doing a large amount of hand soldering.
Code for the control panel is found on GitHub, and print files are available on Thingiverse if you’d like to create your own. As he got 10 copies of the PCB, Brooks might even send you one if you ask nicely enough!