My actual progress toward “polish and present” came a couple days after this post was due, but I’ll save that part for next week. Laser cutting in Washburn went far better than I expected.

Over the weekend, I spent a substantial amount of time splicing together the rest of my LEDs, making a solderable breadboard with the ESP8266, a capacitor across the 5V and GND rails, and wires connecting the slide potentiometer and on/off switch. I hooked up the power supply and ran extra wires for more current for the LEDs. For some reason, only the first 300 LEDs work, I’ll have to spend some more time this week getting the last 46 to receive data.

I also spent some time writing a first pass on the control software for the LEDs. I discovered that the slide potentiometer I bought is actually logarithmic, despite that not being mentioned anywhere on the datasheet. I assume that nearly all linear pots are logarithmic, to be used as faders for audio applications. However, for my application I needed to convert it to linear. Unfortunately, I discovered that the way they make large logarithmic pots is by combining a bunch of small ones, so the formula to convert to linear isn’t perfect. Additionally, the potentiometer reads are somewhat noisy. I will account for this by doing multiple reads and averaging them, and I may build a lookup table to give me evenly spaced intervals on the potentiometer.

Currently I have it set up such that when you move the potentiometer, it highlights one layer, and when it doesn’t move for a few seconds, it returns to lighting all layers. I think I will replace this functionality with a system where you can “park” the potentiometer at the very front, and it will light all layers, any other position highlights either one or two layers. I want to make it so you can scroll through the layers smoothly by fading between them, instead of just snapping between them.

Overall my worries about not finishing this project on time are now put to rest, and I am excited to present it and see everyone else’s works!