The Five Feathers

I have a show coming up and it would be very nice to have some remote-controlled lights in it. These are four enclose oil lanterns. Easy enough to string a bulb into them but I don't feel like running wires all over the building so I can control them.

What I really need is my DuckLight circuit. Which I've not been working on and the turn-around from starting a CAD to finishing the software is at least three weeks. I have two.

So I've purchased several Feather boards from Adafruit. These are Arduino-compatible micros with full USB capability (and onboard LiPo management, which I may or may not be using for this project.) The version of the Feather I picked up was with the 915mHz version of the RFM69 daughterboard integrated on to it. Low BAUD packet radio in a license-free band.

The RFM69 takes more software on the host side than the XBee, which is why I started with the latter. I knew I'd have to move to a more powerful host than the ATTiny series to run them, and when I was last working on the DuckLight project I hadn't gotten into SMD yet. I still have yet to go more legs than a SOT-23 package, so that would be one more thing to have to get right the first time in order to make a three-week turn-around.

Since the Feather does HID and can answer a terminal, I should be able to set it up for software control from the laptop. I'm using them to send serial to a neopixel "Jewel" each; a cluster of 7 RGBW LEDs that between them should put out about half the wattage per channel of one of my Cree. Or about twice the wattage I run the Holocrons at. Visual intensity is of course power law so make of that what you may.

I have three days to write the software. Three working days, in which I'll be at my day job, also cleaning up some microphones for a renter, making a meeting or two, and shipping a Holocron kit out.


Boards are answering the programer now -- had some problems with board definitions and a missing library. Should probably test the neopixels next as that will give me feedback for the RF link stage of the programming.