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

• 2024-04-18: 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
• 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