Making a breathing night light with sea glass #Trinket #NeoPixels
John Graham-Cumming provides a repost of a nice project that makes a “breathing” night light from glass washed up on a beach and a microcontroller + LEDs.
This code drives a string of four Adafruit NeoPixel LEDs connected to an Adafruit 5V Trinket causing the four LEDs to glow white with varying brightness that emulates the rhythm of human breathing.
The four LEDs are hidden inside the sea glass and kept inside an old glass jar.
The code is pretty simple. It uses the Adafruit NeoPixel library to drive the four LEDs. The LEDs are literally cut with scissors from a strip and then bent into a circle and super-glued together.
Breathing
The breathing is based on the old “sleep LED” on Macs (the explanation I originally used was to be found here and can now be found on the Internet archive). (Note that Adafruit’s Ladyada did some reverse engineering work on the Mac’s breathing light way back and the origin of the formula is from a comment on her post).
The formula for the LED brightness is
where x is the number of milliseconds since start. It looks like this when plotted (there’s a sharper intake of breath than exhalation):
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