Conceiving of cool Arduino projects is great fun... but getting them designed implemented and deployed can be hard. You need to select components, source them, study pinouts, work out how to wire it up, construct, power and house amongst other things. Then there is the software, which so often starts simple but suddenly becomes complicated. Wouldn't it be great if this complexity were removed and I could just take an off-the shelf design with supporting software? This is what StrawberryString delivers for your Motion detection projects.
And what's great is it's designed to be portable and deployable in the real-world, not stuck on a bench.
StrawberryString is comprised of the following:
- Arduino Nano
- MPU6050 Motion Sensor
- A string of 5 RGB LEDs (Neo-pixel or similar)
- A 4.35V LiHV battery + JST2.0 connector
- Some rubber bands
The Nano is used without header pins attached.
Solder the battery connector to GND and 5V above pins A7.
The MPU6050 is soldered piggy back onto the Nano (using header pins in pins A4, A5, A6, A7). Wire A6 through to ground next to Pin D2. Wire A7 through to 5V on the pin above it (shared with the battery connector).
The LED string is wired to the GND, VCC and pin D11 (MOSI) exposed on the ICSP header.
Wrap in elastic bands to protect the cables and electronics. as shown
The battery can also be bundled up and connected with rubber bands if desired.
The StrawberryString library continues to speed your development. Once you have constructed your hardware then you can just create a StrawberryString instance in your sketch, initialise it, and go! You don't have to worry about setting up the pins, getting the libraries working and setup or debugging hardware related mistakes. The StrawberryString library is a standard tested driver for the StrawberryString hardware. It also builds on the SweetMaker MotionSensor library giving you all the power of motion sensing which it offers.
Check out the MotionSensor library here
Each MPU6050 requires calibration and those calibration values must be used everytime the MotionSensor starts for proper operation. The StrawberryString automates this by, firstly, providing an auto-calibration procedure, and secondly storing the calibration values in EEPROM for use next time it starts. In addition your project may require a deployment specific offset rotation. This again can be stored in EEPROM avoiding the need to hardcode into software which stops the code being portable across deployments or frustrates the process of using other example projects.
ExamplesThe StrawberryString also comes with example projects which you can recreate or use as a reference for your own projects. Check out the motion sensitive LightCap project.
SweetMakerStrawberryString is part of and makes use of the SweetMaker framework created for Arduino, for making making easier. It is an asynchronous event driven embedded library offering various features from timers, performance monitoring and signal generation. Check it out on GitHub
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