Use a Chunithm control panel on PC!
This fork adds reactive lightning to the air towers, and in the future maybe some on-boot preset settings selection.
Oh and the pinout is slightly changed from the upstream, to work with a Pro Micro board.
Warning
Due to the LED code here being so simple, you must have a relatively recent version of the FastLED library installed, otherwise, your air tower LEDs will flicker. I'm not sure which would be the minimum required, but 3.9.4 is proven to work.
The Chunithm panel is made of air towers and a ground slider.
The air towers are made of 6 photo interrupters and 2 LED strips which can be interfaced with an Arduino. See ChunithmIO for a firmware example which turns them into a keyboard device.
In this example, each IR sensor responds 1:1 to a key, i.e. when covered, the key is pressed, and when uncovered, the key is released. Going from the bottom to the top the keys are a, b, c, d, e, f. Their keycodes are as follows
ir1=0x41
ir2=0x42
ir3=0x43
ir4=0x44
ir5=0x45
ir6=0x46
As each tower has 3 sensors and 3 emitters, so if you switch sides when wiring them up, the keys will get shuffled into the following order: b, a, d, c, f, e.
The Ground Slider is an RS232 device and can be connected directly to the PC for native use. This repo contains a python script to help verify correct wiring. See slidertest folder readme for more info.
It's the best to keep the slider connected to the COM1 port.
If you are this deep, you will surely be fine without diagrams. Especially since everything is pretty self-explanatory and all pin holes in JST plugs are clearly numbered.
This is the power input connector. Goes to a 12V source. You will most likely use a dedicated 12V wall adapter, but you can get creative here (e.g. get a Molex plug or a PD charger and trigger).
- yellow - +12V
- black - GND
- green - earth (can be left disconnected)
This is the serial input/output connector. Goes to your RS232 adapter.
- white (RX) - DB9 pin 2
- red (TX) - DB9 pin 3
- black (GND) - DB9 pin 5
This is the air strings (sensors) connector.
- 1 (red) - to Arduino +5V (may be marked
RAWon the PCB), - 2 to 7 (stripped grey) - to the other tower pins 2 to 7,
- 8 to 10 (stripped white) - to the Arduino GPIO 8, 9, and 10 (left tower) or 14, 15, and 16 (right tower),
- 11 and 12 (black) - to Arduino GND,
- 15 (green) - earth (can be left disconnected)
This is the LED strip connector. Needs a 12V source. Yes, another 12V line. But it can be connected in parallel with slider's 12V supply (keeping in mind the wire gauge and the rated power of your 12V source).
- yellow - +12V
- striped white - LED data - goes to Arduino GPIO 5 (blue - left tower) or 6 (orange - right tower).
- black GND - goes to power supply GND and Arduino GND (but they are probably common ground anyway)
The LEDs are WS2811 in RGB order, with 9 LEDs per strip. They are, however, wired such that each WS2811 ID controls a group of 3 actual LEDs, so it's not possible to control each one separately. It comes out to 2 sensors per group of 3 LEDs.
According to rough calculations done on the Cons&Stuff Discord server, all LEDs in the whole panel assembly (slider + towers) could draw as much as 18W. However, such situation is highly unlikely, with 15W being suggested to have a reasonable margin already. And on top of that, people's experiences show that a 12W PSUs are fine.