The Prop Blade

Timothy D. Swieter

I recently posted a new product on Brilldea that we call the Prop Blade.· The Prop Blade is a controller for use in lighting and theatrical environments as well as for general purpose learning and having fun.· The Prop Blade is a 3" by 3" PCB and uses a Propeller MCU.· Other items on the Prop Blade include:

• DMX-512A transmit and receive circuit, connectors and terminating resistor.
• 5V DC and 3.3V DC regulators.
• 10 DIP switches and 5 tactile switches (multiplexed together).
• 2 Groups of I/O located on 0.1" headers.· Most I/Os are brought to the headers so you have complete and total access for designing add-on boards and external circuitry.
• One debug LED.
• On/off switch and power LED.
• Programmed using the Prop Plug

A·schematic for the controller and BOM are available on the product·page.· We are still working on the data sheet but hope to have that cleaned up in·a couple days.· The Prop Blade was designed to make it easier to interface to DMX for my LED lighting applications.· More specifically the Prop Blade was designed to run the LED Painter (a 16 Channel RGB LED controller), that Brilldea·sells.· Last week several popular blogs like Make, Engadget and Gizmodo had entries about the LED Windows we created for our church here in Hong Kong.··The LED·Windows use Prop Blades and LED Painters.· Here are a couple videos of the installation.

Installation Video
Randomly generating looks

In the future we will use the Prop Blade to test and validate products that we design.· What I mean is that we will design boards to attach into the I/O groups and on those boards we can place PCBs or PCBAs to test and verify the device under test is working properly.

I attached two pictures.· The first is an assembled and installed Prop Blade close up.· The other shows the Prop Blade and an LED Painter on one of the lighting panels for the LED Windows.· You may notice the perf board in the upper left.· The LED Window system used a single power supply per window and the power supply was in the 12 to 13 V DC range.· After running the Prop Blade for a while it started to act erratically and I determined that the 5V regulator was shutting down because it was burning hot!!· So I added an external regulator and I also added a fan to keep air moving around in the enclosed space.· Even though the PCB silkscreen has a label of 9 to 12V DC, it should be more like 6 to 9V DC like the demo and protoboards.· I didn't design enough heat sink into the PCB.· I know better for next time.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.

www.brilldea.com·- Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, uOLED-IOC
www.sxmicro.com - a blog·exploring the SX micro
www.tdswieter.com

QuattroRS4

Nice work Timothy ..

Regards,
John

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'Necessity is the mother of invention'

Timothy D. Swieter

Thank you John.

I am working on a ligh/music show for the LED Windows similar to what I had for my living room display. The LED Windows are 432 channels total where the living room display was only 96 channels. I don't really feel like hand programming that many channels so I have a little app I created to capture a portion of the PC screen and translate it to an Enttec Open DMX USB device. I still need to test it, but with an applicaiton like this I could creat the routines in Flash or some other animation program. Still tedious, but a lot more flexibility to adjust and change things.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.

www.brilldea.com·- Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, uOLED-IOC
www.sxmicro.com - a blog·exploring the SX micro
www.tdswieter.com

Javalin

good one. Nice PCB.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Nice website, too! That must've taken quite a bit of effort to produce.

-Phil

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'Still some PropSTICK Kit bare PCBs left!

Timothy D. Swieter

Thank you for the feedback.

I enjoy putting together web sites. Well....most of the time I enjoy it. I often know what I want and then I work and test to get it. Then I find out there is a problem with IE or Firefox or Opera that doesn't render it right (usually it is IE that cuases the problem).

The latest version TDSwieter.com web site is a template that was modified some what for colors and logo and my content. SXmicro.com blog is also a template, but I modified it to fit what I wanted it to do. Brilldea is my own creation and I still have some features and ideas I want to get into it.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.

www.brilldea.com·- Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, uOLED-IOC
www.sxmicro.com - a blog·exploring the SX micro
www.tdswieter.com

BTX

Very nice work Timothy !! Congratulations !!

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Regards.

Alberto.

Timothy D. Swieter

Thank you BTX. I know the little wall I created isn't nearly as cool as the LED stuff you have done!

I updated the BOM on Brilldea's site. I had a couple Digikey part numbers wrong. Soon I hope to have the data sheet finished. I am also looking into providing a kit for the Prop Blade and the LED Painter, but I haven't finalized prices yet. If you are intersted, drop me an e-mail or a PM.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.

www.brilldea.com·- Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, uOLED-IOC
www.sxmicro.com - a blog·exploring the SX micro
www.tdswieter.com

Timothy D. Swieter

I finally got a datasheet posted for the Prop Blade over at Brilldea.· I also have a limited quantity of kits for the LED Painter and the Prop Blade available.· E-mail or PM me if you are interested.

http://www.brilldea.com/product_PropBlade.html

http://www.brilldea.com/product_LEDPainter.html

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.

www.brilldea.com·- Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, uOLED-IOC
www.sxmicro.com - a blog·exploring the SX micro
www.tdswieter.com