I was able to get it mostly brushed-looking. :D I keeping adding fingerprints to it as I work around it. I'll give it one more once-over before the trip to Vegas.
Special thanks to @mattjackson for helping me turn out those light brackets, license plate and motor compartment lid so quickly the other day. Here are the pieces in-place on the chassis:
The relay board is installed and each 12V light on the chassis can be easily controlled by the Arduino that's onboard:
Here they are powered and switched to the closed position:
The NeoPixel RGB LEDs are all in-place and ready to be controlled. I have 4 3A UBECs (Universal Battery Eliminator Circuits) on the chassis to supply up to 12A for all 120 NeoPixels, which fully lit to brightest white would draw over 7A. I put some wiggle room in each section of LEDs. Here are the LEDs on the bottom of the chassis:
Each NeoPixel is individually addressable, so it should be fun to make animated patterns under the Chairiot, especially while in motion. I'm thinking about tying the RPM sensors to smoothly sweep colors under the chassis to match the speed of the chair.
The Arduino on the chassis handles controlling of the Sabertooth 2x60 motor controller, individual 12V lights, NeoPixels and reading of sensors (temperature, RPM, etc.). It takes a cool, simple little protocol to command it and a simple RJ-45 port for control devices to use to communicate with it. OR, you can jack in a Bluetooth, Zigbee or other RF module capable or regular serial over UART to easily wirelessly control the chassis, lights and all! Here's a screenshot of the help text I had in the firmware while testing it:
I'll be simplifying that down to just bits and bytes once I'm finished hand-commanding it over serial from the computer. I'll blog about how I do the safety stuff and the communications handshake and all that. It's also listed in the "Details" section of this website, if you're interested in the nitty-gritty. The protocol is pretty detailed, but super-simple to use.
