Photons, Electrons, and Dirt

Splice vault. Bicycle not included. Notice the fancy Fort Collins Connexion and City of Fort Collins logos?

This post if the first in a series of post that describe the installation of the Fort Collins Connexion municipal broadband service. I’ll append new information to the bottom of the post whenever something happens on my street. When the post gets too long, I’ll start a new post. Work has been going on in the northwest corner of my neighborhood since the end of July. It’s only in the last week that activity has started happening on my street. Read on to hear more about the process.

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Control the bicycle traffic signal over Wi-Fi using a Particle Photon.

In the first post in this series, we built a miniature LED bicycle traffic signal using 3D printing, laser cutting, a sticker, and an Adafruit Neopixel Jewel. In this post, we’ll look at bringing the signal to life using a Particle Photon. We’ll start with basic code to blink the traffic signal green, yellow, and red then add code to control the color over the web using the Particle Cloud or locally using an iPad and the Art-Net protocol.

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Completed bicycle traffic signal cycling through traditional traffic light colors. This is the older, narrower version of the hood.

This is the first in a series of posts describing how to build a Wi-Fi enabled bicycle traffic signal. In this first part, we’ll go over the required parts, using a 3D printing and laser cutting service to build the needed mechanical components, and assembling the traffic signal. In the second and third posts, we’ll connect the bicycle traffic signal to a Particle Photon and Adafruit Feather M0 Wi-Fi respectively to enable the traffic signal to be controlled via Wi-Fi. In the final post, we’ll build our own control electronics, add a small base to house the new electronics, and expand the signal to three lights.

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Below the fold are 14 images that sum up the nonsense we fought ($901,000 vs our $15,000) in Fort Collins to get muni broadband in 2017. Very disingenuous opposition hoping to spread profound misinformation.

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The completed giant USB three key mechanical keyboard.

After seeing this giant mechanical keyboard at Adafruit, I decided I had to build my own. Adafruit made theirs out of wood and used one of their Python-compatible microcontroller boards. I wanted a sloped top on my keyboard. I also wanted to check out what was new with Microchip’s USB device stack. I decided to build my keyboard out of aluminum and use a PIC18 microcontroller.

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The 48-segment RGB LED board connected to the Arrow/Trenz MAX1000 FPGA board.

The 48-segment RGB LED bar graph is back. In previous posts, I wrote about using a Teensy 3.2 board and a Digilent Arty board to drive the bar graph. This time I’m driving the bar graph with a $29 Arrow / Trenz Electronics MAX1000 FPGA board. This board has a small Intel / Altera MAX10 FPGA and a few peripherals on it and is more than capable of driving the bar graph too.

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