Making lights blink with Pa

This weekend my dad came to visit.*

Apart from doing very nice things, like a cycle ride across a big red bridge, we had fun playing with electronics. It went something a bit like:

Me: Hey Dad, not seen you in a while, look at some of the stuff I’ve got (points at arduino, flora, and a few sensors).
Pa: Oh very nice, let me just go to my moderate sized carry on suitcase and find a HUGE bag full of color sensors, arduino shields, neopixels, oscilloscopes (etc.).
Me: Oh blooming heck, how did you fit all of that in your case, and omg lets play!
Pa: Well, you never know when you will need to tinker whilst you are traveling.

Anyway. Over the course of the weekend we did some tinkering and it was a lot of fun to do this with my dad. My questions were greeted with a sense of joy, pride, enthusiasm, and curiosity. It’s been a long time since we made anything together.

We ended up testing out the LOL board.

LOL (lots of LEDs) board making some funky helix motions.

And then we were curious about how it worked, so we made our own (very basic) multiplex and chraliplex versions. I’ll post some circuit illustrations about how these work soon -but it is a really great way to control lots of LEDs with few connections (multiplexing 9 LEDs = 6 wires, Charliplexing 6 LEds = 3 wires)

Multiplexing

Charliplexing

And dad taught me how. And all the way it was a wonderful exchange, and fun, and I learned so much through us both learning. Thanks for sharing dad.

*a weekend added on to a week conference in Portland -my family are not so extravagant that they make 5000+ mile weekend trips yeah!