Column: Electronics design


Figure 6: Guide lines


Figure 7: Bending the LEDs


Figure 5: The stack of driver boards


Figure 9: 3D rendering showing the whereabouts of an 8x8 section within the cube


slightly more complex shift and rotation macros. By using a previous graphical LCD component, I could rip out the text-drawing macro and, by finally adding a double buffering system to the simulation side of the component, I completed the feature. To add the embedded functionality,


Figure 8: Assembling 8×8 sections


using the simulation API to clone the sphere enough times to match the X, Y and Z dimension properties. I then created routines to get and set the colour of each individual sectiopn. T is then allowed me to generate the line and cuboid drawing routines, as well as the


I created an array of 16-bit variables to store each of the LED colour values in the cube. I then created a routine which can be called repeatedly to handle functions like clocking out the data to the buffers and switching between the eight common channels. Finally, all that was left to do was to add code into the get-and-set-colour macros to allow the array to be read and written when not running via the simulation. The final component is now available, which can simply be dragged onto the Flowcode panel. The Flowcode program is shown in Figure 13.


14 February 2022 www.electronicsworld.co.uk Figure 10: Preparing the base


Visualisations The Flowcode tool has been used to develop a set of test programs to generate a rain effect with lightning, a fireball, two interacting plasma balls, a textual display and a vector-based animation. The next step is to add a microphone


to circuitry and use it to control the movement of the visualisations using techniques such as FFT to chop up the audio signal into frequency bins.


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