Project Starscape: Demo or Fail

What is Project Starscape?

The concept is pretty simple. The idea is to recreate astronomical or other animated displays upon a ceiling to provide entertainment for children or children-at-heart when they go to sleep at night.

How was Project Starscape implemented?

The implementation, on the other hand, is complex. 'Pucks' (wireless LED pixel units) must form a network with their neighbors and a control station. This is done using infrared signaling modulated at 38kHz. Each puck has eight transmitters and eight receivers, forming eight transceiver pairs. Each puck can receive from all sides simultaneously but can only transmit from one LED at a time.

At a higher level, the implementation requires setting up an ad-hoc network complete with routing. This was not fully completed in time for our demo as we had a few bugs in our implementation, but it was *almost* working. As a plan B, we've setup a simpler broadcasting scheme.

In what you see in the second section of this video, a controller is sending packets to a master puck, called Puck Zero, which then forwards the message addressed to individual pucks or using a special address called ALL_PUCKS. It is simply broadcasting out all sides, one at a time.

This video demonstrates a fraction of the work completed on Project Starscape by myself and my fellow lab partners at the University of Washington, class EE478.

Authors:
Deepti Ramakrishna
Revathi Murthy
Brad Basler

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• AVR
• starscape
• infrared
• IR
• wireless
• RGB
• led
• diy
• ee478
• capstone
• UW
• huskies