Hi! I'm Peter!

I'm an Electrical Engineering student with a multitude of hobbies.

Find me on GitHub, YouTube, or Linkedin.

Favorite Projects of Mine

Miniature Stage Light Show

I love this project because I get to flex my light show passion with something so small I can easily fit in my room. It also just looks so awesome.

The majority of the lights are ws2812b pixels on LED strips. I've recently upgraded the "video wall" in the back from 4 16x16 ws2812b matrices to 2 p5 panels controlled by a raspberry pi. I also have a couple 12V warm orange lights on the left and right side that were designed to be waterproof to put on cars and bikes, but I 3D printed a black cover around them to narrow down their beam.

These lights are all controlled by QuinLED Dig-Octa Brainboards as I had been using them for my Christmas Light Show, but that won't be returning for another year or two as I'm away at college and don't have enough time.

Recently, I've been working on building some moving head fixtures for this stage. This is a challenge, mostly because the scale is so small, and so is my budget. I've designed the mover around two 9-gram servos. One for pan, one for tilt. I designed a circuit board that fits agains the pan servo. This board is based on an rp2040, and handles both the servos and has a constant current driver for the LED. It receives non-differential TTL DMX data over a single-wire (plus ground) bus that connects all the moving heads to a single ESP32. That ESP32 has Ethernet, and is programmed such that it bridges the gap from E1.31 network DMX data to the non-differential TTL DMX.

My main problem with the current design is the wide and dull beam. I'm aiming for a sharper and narrower beam, and I have more of a wash right now. It's really hard to find cheap, mass-produced optics for what I need at this scale, but I have some new lenses on the way to try out. Another issue is actually the LEDs. I've been using ~3W leds shipped presoldered onto aluminum PCBs. These are great for brightness, but one of the main things I'm looking for that they don't list on the site is whether or not there are multiple diodes in the package spaced from eachother. In order for me to get the sharpest beam possible, I need just one tiny point source of light going into the lens. A lot of LEDs, including the ones I'm currently using, have multiple LEDs in the package, which actually produces multiple beams at different angles. Fortunately, the white LEDs have a phosphor that helps to diffuse this effect, but it also makes the beam very dull. I have some new LED packages coming that should have only a single LED in each one, preventing this from being a problem.

For more information on this project, and to download any of the files, check out my github page.