Sparkfun’s Spectacle - Playing with the Lights
For those that missed Yesterday’s post, Sparkfun (www.sparkfun.com) sent me their new Spectacle (https://www.sparkfun.com/pages/spectacle) kit to play with. Spectacle is made for people who don’t want to get into electronics as a hobby but want to add lights, sound or motion to their projects. Rather than deal with soldering and code you plug the boards together and program with their web app. You can check out the app here: https://spectacle.sparkfun.com/
Today I am looking at their lighting kit:
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14170?_ga=2.215536722.43721405.1496880363-1862285132.1496769715
The pre-set rainbow effect:
1x Spectacle Director Board
The director board is the main board. You plug this into a power source (either wired to a wall or a battery pack) to power most projects. You can also connect your phone or computer into the director board with an audio cable. This allows you to upload your programming.
1x Spectacle Light Board
This is a board with 4 slots for the LED strip to be plugged into. The slots are labled and you reference those slots when doing the programming.
1x Spectacle Button Board
This is board comes with 8 slots for buttons to be added in (numbered 0-7) and a small button on the board (number 8) which can be used as-is.
1x Addressable LED RGB Strip — 1m
This was a long strip of LEDs that can display RGB colours. Mine came with 60 LED pixels. This hooks into the light board via a connecting wire but you can also hook other LED strips together for a longer strand.
1x White Concave Button
This hooks into the button board so you can click it and make things happen.
2x Female Spade Connector Wire — 3ft
These allow you to hook the button up to the button board.
1x JST to JST-SM Wire — 1ft
This is used to connect the LED RGB Strip to the light board.
3x Audio Cable TRRS — 3ft
The audio cables are used to connect the boards together or connect your phone/computer to the director board. They just slide in the audio ports for easy connectivity.
1x USB micro-B Cable — 6ft
1x USB Wall Charger — 5V, 1A
2x USB Lithium Ion Battery Pack — 2.2Ah
The wall charger or the battery pack can be plugged into the director board to power your device. An additional battery pack can be plugged into the light board if more power is needed.
I tried this out with two different set-ups.
1) Wall Plug > Director Board > Button Board > Lightboard with LED Strip
This was set up so when you pushed button #8 (a button on the board) the light would turn on.
2) Battery Pack > Director Board > Light Board with LED Strip
This was set up so that at set intervals the lights would turn on.
There are a lot of pre-set options for special effects: Rainbow Effect, Theater Chase, Scanning Effect, Twinkle Effect, Lightning Effect, Flame Effect and Fade Lights. There were also two options to fill specific pixels: fill and pixel.
The flame effect with a red colour applied:
Really like how easy it is to set up. Everything clips together well.
Once you had one effect working, it was easy to switch out that effect
You are able to set up the effect to work with a button or just activate on its own, which makes it useful for different projects
The light-strip is flexible and the LEDs are very bright!
Google Chrome blocks the spectacle app (Privacy Error), so you will need another browser on your computer or mobile device to program.
When something goes wrong, there is no error code or obvious error flags. For a beginner device, you need to do a lot of playing around and testing to find out where the problem is. However they do have a troubleshooting FAQ. I would like to see a troubleshooting sheet shipped with the product to help with identifying issues or something in their app to help you troubleshoot.
Your volume must be all the way up to transmit the information and not all phones can transmit at a high enough volume to effectively transfer data. You may need to use a computer or alternate device if your phone has this issue.
Some battery packs will turn off if not enough energy is being pulled from them. You will not want to use these packs to power your projects.
The LED strip is really great for where you need a strip of lights. It would go well in a sword, gun or other prop and may work well to light up a visor or pieces of armor. This Lightsaber is a good example of the lights being used. Where it wouldn’t work as well is in something like Shiny Chariot’s wand where the lights are more spaced out and are somewhat non-linear. It also would have trouble with something rounded like Iron Man/Tony Stark’s arc reactor, where the lights should all be forward facing. I would love to see them expand on their options.
Because you aren’t doing your own wiring, there may be more bulk than if you were cutting and soldering your own wire. This is going to work well in projects that allow you to hide the wiring and battery packs.
Since this runs on a battery pack you will eventually need to re-charge the pack. You will want to keep this in mind when using Spectacle in your project as you will either need to remove the pack or have a way to access the charging port.
In instances where a button is used, the existing concave button is really large and would be hard to hide in most props (but would be awesome for an arcade sona cosplay). However you can take off the concave button and be left with a microswitch which is much easier to work with. While the button board also has a button on it, I think it would be difficult to position the board so that button is accessible.
The programming is a little limited. I think it would be difficult to do something like a Daft Punk helmet, at least at this time. I hope they expand their electronic and programming options to allow for some slightly more complex builds to benefit from the ease of putting together this kit.
