Very cool. 5-fold symmetry on the PCB to use up the board allowance is particularly neat.
A trick that poor hobbyists learn early on is to make pads a little larger than necessary for SMT parts so you've got somewhere to wick solder onto. Neopixels (5050 LEDs) are reasonable to hand-solder since the pads extend up the sides of the package, but you can also do QFNs with a bit of practice by placing a big via to get to the central pad from underneath.
doawoo 1 hours ago [-]
Insanely cool and very well built! Natural patterns are a great basis for visuals
XRG 10 hours ago [-]
Love how the 5 PCBs slot into each other to form the final shape.
With respect to the assembly: do yourself a massive favor and let the PCB fab also assemble the LEDs. With a simple bill of materials like this it will add very little cost, it saves you a _lot_ of time, and it might also reduce the chance of component damage from adding too much heat or from accidental ESD strikes. (I don’t know how much these Neopixels can handle, though.)
scoot 8 hours ago [-]
> do yourself a massive favor and let the PCB fab also assemble the LEDs
From the article:
What's next?...using PCB assembly...
asdfasdfe 5 hours ago [-]
I don't agree with this. The board and components are trivial to hand solder.
lukeify 12 hours ago [-]
Cool! Remarkably similar to Voria Labs who produce a product called Lumanoi https://voria.com/
Perhaps an example of convergent evolution? :)
pbronez 6 hours ago [-]
The common element appears to be the use of a Voronoi tessellation to map a field of scattered points (LED locations) to cells.
Love it! I'm currently learning electronics (again, did some in high school) and this kind of project is really inspiring.
Thank you for sharing the build process.
r0b05 11 hours ago [-]
Nice work. Love to see some vintage HN content
joking 8 hours ago [-]
very inspiring. it's nice to see how an idea evolves from a though to a product / installation.
aanet 11 hours ago [-]
This is brilliant
hugoj0s3 11 hours ago [-]
very cool!
hajjamixcv2012 10 hours ago [-]
Phyllotaxis spirals (derived from the golden angle) make such an elegant coordinate space for radial audio visualization because they avoid the density distortion of concentric circular rings.
The trickiest part in these builds is usually balancing transient response with temporal smoothing so the LEDs don't devolve into jittery noise during busy frequency passages. Curious if you're doing per-bin decay filters on the FFT or handling dynamic gain normalization upstream?
turbine401 11 hours ago [-]
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hizlikovboy27 12 hours ago [-]
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onelpawarai-X 9 hours ago [-]
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onelpawarai-X 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
shevy-java 10 hours ago [-]
I don't like the word phyllotaxis.
I understand it was inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllotaxis, but arrangement on leaves serves the purpose of growth in a specific niche. The pattern arises because naturally leaves serve to capture light - see the images on wikipedia there. Phyllo means green. The LEDs used here do not really tap into any of that, and the name is also a misnomer. That's not good.
pierrec 3 hours ago [-]
The pattern in OP's project can be called phyllotaxis. This is supported by the link you provide which gives even looser examples that are still described as "exhibiting phyllotaxis". A lot of words refer to nature if you look into semantics, not surprising if you consider the amount of beautiful and useful patterns it gives us.
rglullis 9 hours ago [-]
There is no worse form of bikeshedding than naming pedantry.
HappMacDonald 9 hours ago [-]
Agreed. All variable names should be single-letters as the Greek Gods intended :D
cwmoore 6 hours ago [-]
I disagree with sibling comments. You are correct to express the confounding implications of a word choice. And they have only detracted from the point you make.
Of course the design is cool and beautiful, but it is not the thing it is called here.
I bought one of those some time ago.
Might interest the HN crowd...
https://www.evilgeniuslabs.org/one-inch-fibonacci128
A trick that poor hobbyists learn early on is to make pads a little larger than necessary for SMT parts so you've got somewhere to wick solder onto. Neopixels (5050 LEDs) are reasonable to hand-solder since the pads extend up the sides of the package, but you can also do QFNs with a bit of practice by placing a big via to get to the central pad from underneath.
With respect to the assembly: do yourself a massive favor and let the PCB fab also assemble the LEDs. With a simple bill of materials like this it will add very little cost, it saves you a _lot_ of time, and it might also reduce the chance of component damage from adding too much heat or from accidental ESD strikes. (I don’t know how much these Neopixels can handle, though.)
From the article:
What's next? ...using PCB assembly...
Perhaps an example of convergent evolution? :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram
Where do you see similarities?
Too bad. Software audio visualization's no longer common. But hey your hardware visualization's better than software! :D
https://music.apple.com/us/album/neon-pattern-drum/134973653...
Thank you for sharing the build process.
The trickiest part in these builds is usually balancing transient response with temporal smoothing so the LEDs don't devolve into jittery noise during busy frequency passages. Curious if you're doing per-bin decay filters on the FFT or handling dynamic gain normalization upstream?
I understand it was inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllotaxis, but arrangement on leaves serves the purpose of growth in a specific niche. The pattern arises because naturally leaves serve to capture light - see the images on wikipedia there. Phyllo means green. The LEDs used here do not really tap into any of that, and the name is also a misnomer. That's not good.
Of course the design is cool and beautiful, but it is not the thing it is called here.