LED ‘noodles’ (‘nOOds‘ in Adafruit parlance) are a new addition to the LED scene. They are flexible silicone filaments with diameters of a couple of millimetres and varying lengths and come in a range of colors. They contain many small LEDs internally (you can just about see the individual LEDs within) and are uniformly bright over 360 degrees.

James Hutchby wanted a project that used noodles and settled on the idea of a ‘Medusa’ head with the noodles representing the bodies of the snakes of Medusa’s hair.

I arranged the noodles in a regular circular pattern around the head and that was more attractive and worked better for more choreographed patterns on the LEDs.

I used KiCad to design the PCB and the KiCad Image Converter to turn bitmap images of Medusa’s head and the snakes’ heads into KiCad footprints.

There are twelve noodles in total and the processor I used to control them was an 8-pin PIC12F1840. I used Charlieplexing to allow me to drive that many LEDs with a minimal number of pins.

See the video below and more on Hackaday.io.