[WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

I guess this could be called ambience TOH too, but I chose chameleon :)

This TOH prototype will have at some point (hopefully) following features:

- user selectable TOH color via SW
- "chameleon" mode: TOH will change color i.e. when you put the phone on a table or close to some other object. RGB sensor gives the color of the object and TOH will be adjusted according to that value

I'm using following components:

- https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9904
- http://www.adafruit.com/products/1334
- https://www.inventables.com/technolo...ptic-backlight
- https://www.inventables.com/technolo...ser-film-rolls

There's currently about 6 mm thickness increase in my TOH model, but I believe it can be reduced to 3-4 mm with custom pcbs.

Video (nothing fancy, just testing how to spread the light evenly): https://vimeo.com/87360711

http://relativity.fi/jolla_chameleon/chameleon4.JPG

Pictures: http://relativity.fi/jolla_chameleon/

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

This just look awesome :)
Will you hook it up with the notifications? (new call, new sms, charging and so on)

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

Yes, I'm planning to.

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

Those fiber optic backlight panels are a bit tricky. I tested them with different configurations (that's why stuff is connected in the pics so poorly):

The fibers have to be positioned to point straight to the LED to get enough light out of them. There has to be also some diffuser film between to get uniform color across the panel. Otherwise some fibers may have different color than others.

In a dark or shady room the cover is almost too bright. Normal house lightning is ok too, but the the effect is not so notable. Note that I haven't tested 5 V yet, only 3,3 V.

At sunlight there should be a wall of superbright leds to see changes in illumination, two leds just doesn't cut it. Adding more leds is not an option, because they draw too much power. Those 2 RGB leds will draw about 120 mA (60+60) at full brightness which will significantly reduce battery duration.

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

This is propably too big http://dangerousprototypes.com/2014/...ws2812-family/

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

Yes, 8 mm is pretty thick.

BlinkM minis are good, but they are now in 45 degree angle. 90 degree would be optimal to get most of the light into the fiber optic backlight panels, but then TOH thickness would be 12 mm.

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

wow really cool project!! Best of luck skvark

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

You should go to side-firing rgb leds (rare), or single-color and arrange fibers so that every other goes to different color.

or skip the fiber-thing, and use sidefiring with diffusors, something like in lcd backlights. ?dunno. use more leds with lower current to get even light?

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

Side-firing sounds viable. Arranging fibers, maybe no.

Based on my tests, I think the fiber stuff is enough (indoors). I may change the leds to side-firing ones later to make the TOH thinner. But if there's some backlight + RGB combo and it draws max. ~100 mA I'll happily use it :)

Problem with multiple leds is that every color draws at max. about 20 mA. If I have 10 RGB leds and I drive each color at 10 mA, those 10 (actually 30) leds draw total 300 mA.

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

Wow, so much bling :) Good work Skvark

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

Hmmm.. I did some investigating and found out that the adafruit color sensor breakout is probably fried (as I feared, it's not detected by kimmoli's i2ctool or via Arduino). But that's not a problem since I have the Flora color sensor too :) (i2ctool sees it at correct address and it works fine).

i2ctool did not found BlinkM's but I can control them via Arduino without problems. Problem may be related to the way how BlinkM's are controlled because there are no registers to write to. Instead BlinkM's accept byte streams as commands so they need some special code to work correctly.

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

chameleon TOH would be awesome! i look forward to seeing this come to fruition! =]

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

Was the name "chameleon otherhalf" trademarked already? :p

https://vimeo.com/90977296

http://oi57.tinypic.com/15pl9q9.jpg

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

u has uranium in ur jolla

/

http://forum-images.hardware.fr/images/perso/wiids.gif

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

Heh, no it's not :) What's that material? Looks nice.

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

its some special stuff! will make moar when done printing keyboards!

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

dose it work now?

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

I'm have been writing a simple application & drivers for the BlinkM's and TCS34725. If there's no problems I'll have something to show soon(tm).

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

https://vimeo.com/91090091

App supports currently only fading into RGB. Video has bad colors and those tiles are just all the web safe colors :)

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

skvark, just out of curiosity; what you used to interface application to I2C ?

root-powers-daemon and dbus or something more elegant?

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

Nothing fancy, just kernel i2c-dev headers. Had to test that I get the blinkm's working. More elegant stuff later.

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

https://github.com/skvark/ChameleonHalf

Some initial code. I'll add the sensor stuff and more BlinkM methods when I have more time.

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

Color reading is now implemented to the sensor driver. I'm not sure if the onboard LED at the Flora sensor board can be turned completely off.

I'm using currently 700 ms integration time because shorter ones don't give reliable results (impacts to resolution and sensitivity). I'll do next some testing and code the automatic color change for the leds using the sensor values.

Edit: Some kind of polling is now too implemented. I'll make a short demo video at some point to show how well (or badly) the sensor performs :D

Re: [WIP] Chameleon TOH
 

https://vimeo.com/91553447

Note that the colors in the video are not the same as in real world. The sensor is polled about every 700 ms and RGB leds fade to the detected color. Additionally the color box in the UI is updated also to the detected color.

Sensor detects well green, blue, yellow and white colors (which were tested in the video too). It has some problems detecting different reds/orange.