FLCBeacon

FLCBeacon will be a beacon to help me find my cabin at night at the camp I work at each summer, and also to be pretty and sparkly. It'll be made of mostly off-the-shelf parts plugged together, as I have limited time to get it put together.

Project Status

• 2024-04-29: Parts arrived to start prototyping.
• 2024-04-25: LilyGo got T-Echos back in stock, so ordered one to use as a remote.
• 2024-04-18: Design has been put together and parts to start prototyping it have been ordered.

Basic Architecture

There will be a control box with most of the parts in it including a battery, that will connect to each LED strip. It will also connect to a "sensor box" with an ambient light sensor and a proximity/distance sensor to sense people walking by, this will be via I2C so that more things could be daisy-chained onto it later.

Hardware

• Control Box
  • CPU/NeoPixel Driver - Feather RP2040 SCORPIO
  • Wireless I/O - LoRa Radio FeatherWing
  • Current/Voltage Monitoring - INA219 FeatherWing
    • Proto space on this will be used for FETs to disable power to each strip, to save power when nothing is displayed and during the day time
  • Display Driver - eInk Feather Friend
  • Boost Converter for LEDs - PowerBoost 1000 Basic
• Sensor Box
  • Ambient Light Sensor - BH1750 STEMMA QT
  • Proximity Sensor - VL53L4CX STEMMA QT
• Light Strips
  • 60LED/m RGBW NeoPixel
• Remote
  • TBD

TBD

• What to use as a LoRa remote control (LilyGo T-Echo?)
• Enclosures for control box and sensor box
• Connectors for everything (all water resistant since it'll potentially be out in the rain)
  • Control box needs:
    • Charging input
    • 4x LED strip
    • I2C Out for sensor box
  • Sensor box needs:
    • I2C In
    • I2C Out
• Power switch?
  • They tend to get bumped and be hard to waterproof, maybe the sensor cord could also bridge two pins that connects the battery when plugged into the control box? Or something like that.
• eInk display to display messages and stuff on, specifics will depend what enclosure I end up using

Development Phases

As I have a limited amount of time to get this done and want to make sure it has at least basic useful functionality, I've planned out the order to do development in. Phase 1.5 is the minimum viable product that would be useful at camp.

• Phase 1
  • Able to be a standalone beacon that will run when manually turned on
  • No remote control or dusk-to-dawn types of functionality
  • No interaction, just "do patterns whenever it's turned on"
  • No sensor box, no LoRa or eInk FeatherWings
  • Not yet packaged nicely in a finished design

• Phase 1.5
  • Phase 1 but packaged into a finished control box
  • Control box will have room for the extra FeatherWings to be added in the future, but wouldn't include them yet

• Phase 2
  • Phase 1.5, plus automatic turn-on at dusk
  • Still manually turned off when going to bed
  • Adds sensor box to the electronics

• Phase 3
  • Phase 2, plus remote control functionality to turn the beacon on or off manually
  • Adds LoRa FeatherWing and basic LoRa functionality

• Phase 4
  • Phase 3, plus "someone walked past" functionality for a special pattern
  • Adds proximity sensor to the control box

• Phase 5
  • Phase 4, plus eInk display functionality to display current status and a little welcome message
  • Adds eInk FeatherWing

• Phase 6
  • Phase 5, plus eInk display of where I currently am (since T-Echos have a GPS in them)
  • No additional hardware, just more code