Inspiration
Ever since those funky music visualizers in Windows Media Player since Windows XP, I've always liked staring at stuff move around to the rhythm of a song. Now I can do it in real life. The future is now.
What it does
It pulses to music.
It looks a little cooler than it sounds, I think.
How we built it
There's a piece of acrylic precariously held in place with cardboard and tape (it's not even duct tape!!). I took some sandpaper to the acrylic to make it look nice and opaque, so the light diffuses through the acrylic. An Adafruit DotStar LED strip is underneath the acrylic and is hooked to an Arduino with a SparkFun Spectrum shield attached on top. The Spectrum shield is hardware that has 3.5mm jacks for audio input and splits it into 7 frequency band responses, from low to high (because fast Fourier transforms are expensive, yo).
Challenges we ran into
...oh god.
It turns out the Raspberry Pi cannot process analog signals like an Arduino can, and analog signals are what is produced by the Spectrum shield. I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi to make calls to the Spotify API to get the user's currently playing song and change the color of the lights based on the album art, but I had to scrap that since there wasn't really any use for the Pi after I found that out. Wasted a good bit of time following that rabbit hole, unfortunately.
The Spectrum shield, frustratingly enough, does not completely fit on the Arduino Unos that were available. It just barely gets caught on the barrel jack. This means it doesn't make secure contact with a set of pins on the Arduino, and so I literally have to put an object on top of it to keep it steady. Any slight movement will cause the pins to not make contact and make the shield stop working correctly. It's every bit as scuffed as it sounds...but helluva engineering is what we do best here at Gech, I suppose.
I really, really wanted to do more with the reactive lights. As of now, it only shines one color and pulses with the music (which, in and of itself, does look very cool). But I would have loved to incorporate different colors corresponding with different frequencies intermingling in the visualizer. If it weren't 5 in the dang morning right now, I would be working on that. And I really, really wanted to have the colors change based on the Spotify album art.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Even though there are plenty of things I wanted to do with this that I didn't get to do, what I did do at all is pretty freakin' sweet. I've had this idea in my head for the longest time, and it's nice to actually get some part of it out into the real world. Between the soldering (and re-soldering...), laser-cutting, and professional last-minute cardboard architecture, I put in good work on this. It's always fun to mess around with hardware alongside software, and I've had this hardware sitting around for the longest time, so it's great to actually put it to use.
What we learned
Raspberry Pis do not support analog input. That one was learned the hard way :)
What's next for LED Music Light Show
I'd like to make this more colorful in ways that mirror the music. Definitely want to have it colored based on album art, and I know the Arduino probably won't be the one making those HTTP requests, so figuring out how to use this on a Raspberry Pi would be nice (perhaps using an ADC chip or something).
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