AutoSub has a large dome. It has a spire. seph helped rebuild it in 2013, repaired and improved it for 2014 and 2015. Here are the notes and instructions.
The AutoSub dome spire has a handful or parts.
There is the white metal spire. This has 11 mounting plates on it. It has through holes where it attaches to the top of the dome. The easiest way to install it, is post dome build.
- Carry it (with all the lighting gack) up the dome.
- Attach one of the bolts.
- Tip it upward, and attach the second bolt.
You probably want 2 people, and you may want a mallet.
There are 12 rainbow LED rings. (11 for the spire, and one extra) They connect to the brackets via a sketchy mess of zip ties. Maybe there's a picture.
They are a bunch of ws2812 style LED strips. They are the 12v variety, this means they are addressable in groups of 3. Logically, they present as one long strand.
Each ring has a 4 conductor connector. Ground, Vin, Data-in, and Data-out. The cable carries power, along with the data jumpers. Because the data jumpers are each only one hop, you must not skip any connectors. They can be open on the tail end, but you must fill from closest to the power supply. (And there are 12 cable slots, so one is unused)
The controller is a small plastic box, with a computer power supply and arduino wedged inside. It's got mesh filtering the input and output, and taped seams. It's held up for 2 years, and seems solid.
The top beacon is a strip of white 5050 LEDs attached to a 2L soda bottle. They are connected to a microcontroller running a simple heartbeat pulse. (Breath in, breath out). They are quite bright, and visible at great distance.
The beacon has a dedicated microcontroller (circa 2015) that hangs out at the top of the spire. The whole assemble just takes 12v. and spits out a heartbeat pattern.
Connectors are anderson powerpoles. They are oriented to ensure input and output are not compatible.
(seph not on playa)
Things came back from 2015 working, but dusty.
Despite high hopes, and 100watt leds, seph did not make any improvements.
All parts were tested, and are unchanged from 2015. Not even cleaned.
(seph not on playa)
seph brought everything home. And in typical fashion, mostly ignored it till summer.
The rings remain fine.
The beacon light was cleaned. The microcontroller was reflashed and taped up a bit better. But no substantial improvements.
seph brought everything home. And in typical fashion, mostly ignored it till summer.
The rings worked fine, and were unchanged.
The beacon was redone on a new soda bottle. Unfortunately, the microcontroller from 2013 returned to it's rightful place, so seph build a trivial arduino + mosfet.
Mixed.
While the rings survived and still look good, the top beacon tied in during a rain and lightning storm. Post event analysis is unclear -- it worked after being reflashed. Not sure if rain or static shorted things, not sure if that's fixable.
Started from scratch. Doug made a white metal spire thing, which brackets every foot.
seph designed and build LED rainbow rings, plus an associated, weather resistant powersupply & controller.
The top beacon was build on playa out of scrap by seph and ???. It was a strip of 5050 white LEDs wrapped around a soda bottle, with a simple microcontroller and a lot of zipties.
Success!
It was visible from great distance, looked good, and survived.
No clue, but I hear it involved EL wire.