The LED dome is mounted on top of the body and provides animations and also visualizes live MEA/neural data. In addition to this, it can also be used to show text and other animations. The LED dome consist of a molded plastic dome, with a WS2812B LED strip attached to the Figure 2.5: The Cyborg LED dome. surface. The LED strip consists of several smaller pieces, mounted together to get one consecutive strip of the desired length, incorporating a total of 791 LEDs. The leds are activated by a 5 V-PWM signal from the LED controller, and require a 5 V voltage supply.

The LED-dome can display several animations such as:

  • eyes and face animations
  • text
  • yellow construction lights
  • red/blue emergency lights
  • ++

Visualizations with the dome open a lot of possibilities in creating various fun behaviors. E.g. emergency lights can be combined with a siren over the speakers while the robot speeds down the corridors. The dome can also visualize neural activity from living biological neural networks.

LED dome controller

The LED controller parses serial data from a Cyborg ROS module, and activates the LEDs on the LED dome accordingly. The controller uses the NodeMCU ESP-32S development board.


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