Introduction: Make a Motion Controlled LED (costume) With Curie

About: A newbie maker working in Maker Collider, a tech startup company in China. I wanna share what we have made with you!

Hello!

Perhaps you have seen lots of beautiful LED dress projects before, like LED Chandelier Dress or Sparkle Dress, but what we have made here is different -- because you can control the LED design and pattern with your motions without any complicated coding involved!

This is how the first prototype of R.I. Dance was made. Though we will not go into details as how the entire costume is made, this motion-controlled LED is undoubtedly at the very core of this project.

If any questions, please feel free to comment below or contact us!

Please like our Facebook Page, more tutorials are coming!

Here we go!

Step 1: Preparation

Before you start, you need to get a Curie Nano board and an LED module, then connect them together with some soldering:

  1. Solder the pin header to the Curie Nano
  2. Solder the DuPont wire to the LED

Step 2: Get All Things Ready

You will need:

  1. Curie Nano development board
  2. a 3.7V lithium battery
  3. LED module
  4. SD card module
  5. SD card
  6. SD card reader

Step 3: Connect

  1. Insert the SD card into the SD card module
  2. Connect the SD card module to the Curie Nano
  3. Connect lithium battery to the Curie Nano

You can see the LED on Curie Nano flashing, which means everything is ok!

Step 4: ​Data Collection

Now let’s do a few actions for Curie identify.

Data from Curie IMU will be automatically stored into the SD card.

Step 5: ​Data Pre-processing

  1. Remove the SD card and insert it into the computer.
  2. Open the action data stored on the SD card with Excel, generate a line graph
  3. Truncate the unstable waveform of the front end and the smooth line between each two waveforms, and the last invalid data
  4. The resulting waveform trend should be saved!!!

The pre-processed data will be put into QriNeuronPipeline - a feature extraction software by Maker Collider. Then generate several new csv files into the SD card.

Step 6: ​Curie Learning

Unplug the SD card and insert the SD card module again.

Curie will read the data from SD card to start learning.

(In this way, you don't need to program hundreds of complicated lines to tell the computer how to recognize your motion, Curie will do it for you automatically.

However, you do need to code a little in Arduino IDE as what color the LED should display when a specific motion is recognized.)

Step 7: ​Motion Recognition

  1. Remove the SD card module from the Curie Nano
  2. Connect the LED module to the Curie Nano to observe the recognition effect.

You can see Curie Nano has correctly identified the corresponding action and control the LED display different colors!

Last but not least, I attached a video here so that you know what amazing things can derive from this simple practice. :)

Microcontroller Contest 2017

Participated in the
Microcontroller Contest 2017