Nyan Cat Light Show

Inspiration

We wanted to paint something on the tent. We were inspired by the colorful Nyan cat and the great existing Bitcamp pixel art on the tent to paint a colorful Nyan cat.

What it does

It's a static image with pipe cleaners added on. We then added addressable RGB LED strips onto the pipe cleaners to give it some flair. A potentiometer controls one of four modes that the lights can take on - off, psychedelic, wave, and random. It mostly attracts attention from how bright it is.

How I built it

We spent 3 hours painting the Nyan cat, anticipating it would take us 1. The next day, we started the work soldering and coding an Arduino to control the LEDs with various patterns.

Challenges I ran into

We wanted to try to add music into our display of colorful lights, but the Arduino's memory was too small to store music files, and we couldn't get the library that used raw PWM data for the speaker to play more than 4 seconds of audio. Furthermore, we were barely able to hear it, so we scrapped the music idea.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Honestly, we're most proud of painting the cat. We masked different parts of the wood to move up the board and get the lines just straight. It was the most tedious part of the project and only the most time consuming after playing around with the sound library that didn't work.

What I learned

We learned that Arduinos have around 32KB of space for program memory. We also learned how to work with the Arduino IDE and the LED library that we used to control the LED strips.