Project:USB Disco Dance Floor/v1

USB Disco Dance Floor
Created	2011-03-31
Version	1
Members	DMI
Project Status	Prototyping
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Introduction

The aim of this project is to create a USB-controlled, Arudino-powered 70's-style disco dance floor, inspired by a similar project by a student at MIT. It will act as a modular, low-resolution RGB display. Each pixel will be 6-8" per side, and it will come in 4x4-pixel modules that can be connected together.

The board, firmware, and software will (of course) be open-sourced.

Terminology

Each pixel will be referred to as a cell, and each self-contained block of 4x4 pixels will be referred to as a module.

Materials

I plan for the main body of the module to be made of wood, with some sort of frosted/diffused acrylic top. It needs to be strong enough to handle a relatively large number of people jumping up and down on it, as well as potentially spilling drinks etc.

Project log

Top of prototype, as of 2011-04-03

Bottom of prototype, as of 2011-04-03

2011-03-29

• I am building the prototype circuit on veroboard: one 4x4 array of RGB Piranha LEDs, plus three TLC5940 drivers.
• I have yet to decide whether the ICs will be assigned one per colour or just sequentially tie the outputs to the LED pins. I should be able to get 4096 levels per output channel, so this gives me (apparently) 68.7 billion colours per pixel (4096³), which should probably be enough. I'll probably reduce that down to the more standard 256 levels.
• A quick test on breadboard showed that I can at least control one TLC5940 and 5 LEDs as expected, with a sweeping pattern across the outputs. Next stage is doing exactly the same on the veroboard prototype!

2011-04-03

• I have finished soldering the LED array onto the board, including resistors, and I have now made a start on wiring the LEDs to the controllers. I also connected all of the common anodes
• I decided to connect the LEDs to the drivers sequentially, so R0 -> OUT00, G0 -> OUT01, B1 -> OUT02, etc. This was partially prompted by designing a PCB for future use. I hope to have a prototype of the board produced professionally, so I can test and refine it. A future version of the board will have the microcontroller embedded (as described below), or possibly done as an Arduino shield. Turning it into a shield is unlikely, however: the board would be quite large, and routing might be complex. It would likely be more than my version of Eagle can handle!

Future directions

Dance Dance Revolution/Guitar Hero mashup concept

Version 2 of this project will provide RGB+UV for each cell, with pressure sensors. Ideally the pressure sensors will have a resolution of one cell, so that the floor could be used for games (e.g. Tetris or a mash-up of Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero). The Arduinos (or other microcontrollers) will be embedded into the board design, and the PCBs batch-produced.

Note: Tetris requires 10px wide by 20 high for the playing field. DDR would require ((NPlayers * 5) - 1)px wide. It looks like the floor would have to therefore be a minimum of 3x8 modules for Tetris, and probably the same for DDR (but perhaps shorter). For two players, DDR requires a minimum of 3 modules wide, but the height could be relatively variable. The example floor to the right is 3x7 modules.