Rolan do bos

Colour display with the letter "h"
Back of the board

What it does

It is a 4x4 LED board which can display a full range of colours. It shows the logo b s h scrolling across the screen, with the background being rows of a 🌈 rainbow colour gradient which transitions smoothly and at adjustable speeds.

As the board is tilted, the sensors should detect the change and causes the words to fall in the direction of the tilt. When tilted in the perpendicular direction, the intensity of the display changes accordingly.

Overview

There were 3 components to the task:

Programming the lights on the LED module
Read sensors outputs and change lights accordingly
Connect the main board via USB to the computer so that it can be controlled via an app.

Challenges we ran into

We were first stuck on how to connect to the STM device, spending 3 hours on adapting the example code. The example code base did not support the card we were using, so small changes had to be made in many hidden locations.

Sensory inputs worked well when a program is flashed by the Arduino IDE, and the board was able to detect motion patterns like waking up and walking. But we weren't able to initialize the sensors in the STM32 IDE, where our main code was written.

Setting up the USB connection was also unsuccessful, as the model of the particular board isn't supported by any of the software we tried. Instead of being able to respond to keyboard inputs, we kept getting the same error messages.