I was sitting at the hardware table at HackUMass and watching everybody check out Arduinos and Raspberry Pis and ignoring the transistors. So I thought I'd make a few simple circuits for demonstration. First was a simple flex sensor controlling an LED. Then I inverted the behavior--the flex sensor turned off the LED instead of on. Then I did the same sort of thing with the potentiometers from a joystick. It made sense to upgrade to an RGB (red green blue) LED. But there are two potentiometers (and one switch) on the joystick, and three colors in the LEDs. What kind of behavior would be most satisfying?
It was suggested that I implement a classic colorwheel. Three axes, set apart 120 degrees from each other, for red, blue, and green.
Okay, perfect--I can do that with some op amps. There are two axes (potentiometers) on the joystick and each is configured as a voltage divider. We need to make a weighted sum of the X direction and the Y direction outputs of the voltage divider to create the Blue and Green directions. The red is aligned with the Y axis already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_amplifier_applications#Summing_amplifier
I went through a few plans for the design. I ultimately settled on the LM358N chip using a single-sided supply and a virtual ground. The virtual ground I set to half Vcc with a simple voltage divider, guessing that the joystick rests at half Vcc (might not be completely true).
The Blue direction sits 30 degrees below the X+ direction. X*cos(30) + Y*sin(30) implemented in a summing amplifier--that's the first op-amp. For the Green, I used the same calculation, but flipped the X axis using an inverting amplifier, so that takes two more op amps for the Green axis. There are two op-amps per LM358N, so that's two ICs.
Each axis controls an NPN BJT transistor (I chose the 2N4401 for this). The red axis is the output of the joystick Y axis voltage divider controlling the transistor. It looks like it would go in the wrong direction (-Y) but because the summing amplifiers also invert the value relative to the virtual ground, everything ends up working out.
Finally there are some potentiometers inline with the base resistor to allow calibration of the three color channels. I found I got best results when the lights are all on and balanced for a medium white in the middle default joystick state.
This description wasn't very detailed, but it isn't a tutorial. I'm hoping to create a series of high quality instructional resources in the future, and I'd create a module on this circuit as part of that. It takes a lot of time to create high quality content though and I just don't have time at this moment. So for now, if you want to make one, I'll leave the details of implementation as an exercise to you, the reader.
Finally here's the video. I put a piece of plastic on the RGB led to get the diffuse light, because it had a clear package. That made it much nicer to look at, but the video still suffers from poor dynamic range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_amplifier_applications#Summing_amplifier
I went through a few plans for the design. I ultimately settled on the LM358N chip using a single-sided supply and a virtual ground. The virtual ground I set to half Vcc with a simple voltage divider, guessing that the joystick rests at half Vcc (might not be completely true).
The Blue direction sits 30 degrees below the X+ direction. X*cos(30) + Y*sin(30) implemented in a summing amplifier--that's the first op-amp. For the Green, I used the same calculation, but flipped the X axis using an inverting amplifier, so that takes two more op amps for the Green axis. There are two op-amps per LM358N, so that's two ICs.
Each axis controls an NPN BJT transistor (I chose the 2N4401 for this). The red axis is the output of the joystick Y axis voltage divider controlling the transistor. It looks like it would go in the wrong direction (-Y) but because the summing amplifiers also invert the value relative to the virtual ground, everything ends up working out.
Finally there are some potentiometers inline with the base resistor to allow calibration of the three color channels. I found I got best results when the lights are all on and balanced for a medium white in the middle default joystick state.
This description wasn't very detailed, but it isn't a tutorial. I'm hoping to create a series of high quality instructional resources in the future, and I'd create a module on this circuit as part of that. It takes a lot of time to create high quality content though and I just don't have time at this moment. So for now, if you want to make one, I'll leave the details of implementation as an exercise to you, the reader.
Finally here's the video. I put a piece of plastic on the RGB led to get the diffuse light, because it had a clear package. That made it much nicer to look at, but the video still suffers from poor dynamic range.
