hey robot fans and hey fish fans yes I am a huge fan of the band fish I've been
seeing them for many many years this New Year's Eve was the seventh consecutive
New Year's Eve fish extravaganza for me and mrs. patch
BOTS the cool thing about seeing fish at New Year's Eve is that they always do a
stunt or a gag to do the countdown at midnight this year it was a pirate
themed to countdown and the entire audience was wearing these Eylau bands
this created a really cool lighting effect and the Xylo bands stayed lit
through the night past the show all the way until I went to bed but sure enough
when I woke up it was dead so today we are going to try to revive one of these
Eylau bands and see if we can make something fun at all so diving right in
the back of the wristband is secured with four screws you could take those
right off and you're instantly greeted with the battery pack these are three
volt batteries there is a pair wired in series to give you six volts and another
single battery staying at 3 volts these are mounted to a PCB which are
attached with a couple plastic clips and that slides right out the main face of
the wristband has four neopixel lights which is pretty much what I figured and
those are attached to a single hub at the top of the main board and the
wristband lights are attached to two hubs going off of the side of the board
okay here's the main terminal for the neopixels there's four pins here labeled
one through four if we trace off the fourth one we can see that it's a path
on the PCB that travels down here it goes to this guy here which is our four
our four is going to be a resistor and then after our four it goes to this
power source which is if we flip this back over it's the positive terminal of
SK t4 which is the six volt terminal so I know that there were six volts going
into the neopixels these other three pins are your our G and B for your red
green and blue of the neopixels and mixing up those terminals is how you
get all of your colors the first thing I did was get rid of those battery
terminals the batteries are probably dead and I don't plan on using the
terminals anyway so I just hacked those right off next I soldered a ground and a
positive wire to the old battery terminal and
that's all set up okay so we have power going to the back of the wristband here
from a dedicated DC power supply at 6 volts that's going to replicate that
battery series that we had at the back now all we need to do is short out these
pins to see the colors so I have an alligator clip attached to a ground pin
at the corner of the board here and the end of the wire is here so if I start
touching this to the pins we should see color that pin 1 is blue pin 2 is red
and pin 3 is green so cool that works the wristband works and now we just need
to figure out a better way to wire this thing so that we can get to those pins a
little bit easier than touching them with the end of an alligator clip I went
online searching for schematic and I hit paydirt
there was an instructable from a guy who hacked his I lobe and after a Coldplay
show he has schematics wiring diagrams and even some sample Arduino code to run
so this is perfect this will save some time
I went to the pay i soldered the wires to the proper pads
that represent the RGB colors on the board I got it all wired into the
Arduino and I'm currently running the sample code from the instructables page
it basically just runs through all of the colors both the primary and the
secondary colors to show that the neopixels are working properly which
they are so on the hardware side of things I think we're good I drilled a
hole in the back of the wristband to route the wires through after I
reassemble them I slipped the PCB back into its little plastic clips and
screwed it all back together just for good measure I did the same thing with
mrs. patch BOTS wristband and now I have the two synched up running off of the
same software and the same hardware now it's time to figure out how we're going
to display these wristbands part of the pirate theme of New Year's Eve was a
fish themed pirate flag I think I'm going to try to use this as my main
design element I'm going to build this out as a type of box with all the
electronics inside and a switch and then on the top face of the box I'm going to
have a 3d printed pirate fish logo as well as the wristbands mounted and
flashing fish actually just posted a replica flag on their dry goods site so
this is a perfect image for me to use as reference I downloaded the image and
traced it out an illustrator to get it into vector form from there I imported
it into my 3d program and extruded it this gives me a nice 3d model to size
and ultimately print printing all these pieces is going to take some time but
luckily a big brown box has just arrived from Amazon in the Box are three black
ABS plastic sheets 12 inches by 24 inches which in addition to making a
really cool sound are also perfect for constructing the outside of the box
I've also printed out some corner pieces here using some purple filaments since
it's not going to be seen and a special corner piece that's going to house the
switch which will turn everything on the first thing I do is cut down the 24 inch
ABS sheet to about 20 inches which will be the final size of the flag box I also
want to cut out the slots for the wristbands I made these little wristband
holders which will slide into the slot and cover all the rough edges from the
cut with both slots cut I test fitted the wristbands in their holders to make
sure they fit nice and snug which they did I also printed a little
protoboard holder I'm going to use one of these little prototype boards as our
main control panel so that will be held near the center on the back using the
switch corner the board holder and one of the regular corners I glued together
one solid side of the frame from there I can start fitting the main faceplate I'm
going to attach it with a little bit of an inset edge as it turns out the 24
inch by 12 inch boards that I bought from Amazon were actually 20 3.75 by
11.75 so I'm gonna try to make up that
distance with the binding I glue the first main wall onto the faceplate and
clamp it down to dry whoever invented CLA accelerator deserves some kind of
award because this whole process went really quickly I got all the printed
corner pieces attached in no time and was able to also attach all the ABS
sides in one evening and let it cure overnight in the morning I had a nice
sturdy box it looks a little crappy around the edges but that's where the
binding is going to come in I printed a 1/2 inch white binding similar to the
white hem on the pirate flag and attached it all around now we can start
installing the electronics into the box the first thing I did was put some felt
tape onto my wristband holders to make them look a little nicer and I glued
those into place next up is building the circuit board the circuit board is going
to consist of just a few components we have the arduino nano here which is
going to run our code we have a voltage converter which is going to step down
the 9 volts from the wall down to 5 volts for the neopixels i'm using three
NPN transistors these are a tip 120 style which is probably a bit overkill
but it's just what I have on hand and then I have some input pins just to make
everything look nice and neat ok I wired the board together and installed it onto
the back of the sign I got the wristbands wired into the proper
transistors and I even installed a barrel jack onto the switch which will
accept the adapter from the wall and give us our power with everything done
here we can give it our first real test I have some code running that's just
playing each color one at a time to see that everything is wired correctly which
it is so now that the structure is sound and the electronics are done all that's
left to do is add our fish pirate logo assembly goes how you think it would go
just gluing all these little pieces the fish logo the bones and all the
individual little bubbles onto the front of the ABS panel when this is done I let
it cure overnight and then we're basically finished
I updated the code on the Arduino to fade in between the colors I'm gonna
hang this on my wall maybe turn it on during couch tour when I'm doing
something else fish related thanks for tuning into the
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care of your shoes