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.
There are two LED devices: the LED head and the LED box. Both should be able to run the same code. Visualization software can be found in the LED-box repo.
LED head
The LED head is a dome mounted on top of the robot and acts as its head. The LED dome will be able to visualize simple face expressions and the MEA data stream. The dome uses an arduino communicating with the onboard Pioneer LX computer to control the LEDs.
LED box
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