This one’s concept I saw a long time ago on Instructables.com but it happened to end up being the main project for one of my courses at SFU. I thought that was pretty awesome, do a project I wanted to try and also get marks for it too. During university I had very little time to work on personal projects so it was great to be able to allocate school work hours into something I wanted to do anyways.

The twist is that the course was Microcontroller and Embedded Systems, meaning we were not permitted to use the Arduino used in the step-by-step project tutorial online. We had to learn the architecture of another mcu and use that instead. However the university resources were pretty outdated and they wanted us to use a HCS12 Dragon (educational) board programmed via Freescale Codewarrior. Since I believe I’ll never use this architecture in the future, I wanted to learn something useful instead. I have already been working with Texas Instruments boards for a bit, their Launchpad development boards are stupidly cheap (so much I think they lose money on it). The MSP430 DSPs are equivalent to an arduino and I think are equally capable if not more (imo the biggest difference to me is the community and library support). However in recent years, TI started a new line of products called the Stellaris Launchpads. These are designed as introductory products to their high performance Stellaris products and Stellarisware libraries. I’ve used this before on a Intelligent Display Module Stellaris dev kit (RDK-IDM) for my Capstone.

The Stellaris Launchpad (EK-LM4F120) carries a mcu (LM4F120H5QR ) with absolutely amazing specs for a dev kit that only costs $13. When I bought it they were just introducing it and had a promotion and I got 2 of them for $5 each.

A quick overview of it’s specs:

So I’m using this mcu to control my LED Matrix Cube, it has just enough I/O pins to do it too. My goal is to utilize the DSP parts of it to run a spectrum analyzer on an audio feed and play an animated equalizer on the cube.

After meeting the minimum requirements for the course I have not touched this in a while. During the course I hit a lot of bugs in the firmware that I was not able to resolve and I suspect I will need to rebuild the firmware from scratch in order to continue the project.

The project goal is purely aesthetic and the cube will not really serve any purpose, which is why this is a back burner project. I do hope to eventually get back to this so I can learn more about mcu architecture and embedded programming. I did at least put in the effort to create a CAD model of a nice case and had that made from laser cut acrylic. As you can see in the photo, it has a nice gloss black base (missing some square brackets that are used to keep the lid closed and act as feet). Additionally I had cut a clear acrylic box that goes around the LEDs to protect it.