With multiple groups wanting to run through Corellian Conflict, I thought it might be nice to have a single map with LEDs instead of stickers, controlling the LEDs via a web interface. I had a strip of Neopixels that I was using to light my workbench, but some of the Neopixels went dead when I transported it in a box recently. Each Neopixel is a discrete device, so I went through the strip and cut out the pieces that were bad.

The map is in the process of being mounted to foam core at FedEx Office right now. When I get it back, I'm going to cut out each of the control spots on the map and back mount a Neopixel to each location. Each one with essentially be wired together in a 26 light strip. I'll probably 3D print a diffuser of some sort with some white plastic to enhance the look of the map. The whole thing will be mounted at one of the local stores.

You'll assign control and attacks via a web interface. The map will have buttons to switch between games with a small display to indicate which game is being shown. I'm not sure yet if I'll use an ESP8266 or an Arduino Yun to control the whole thing, but I'm leaning towards the ESP8266 since it's cheaper and would allow me to potentially make these for other people.

Awesome. Way over the top in the best way. Have you started the campaign yet?

We started the campaign last night. Unfortunately, FedEx botched the mount, and so I'm stalled a few days on that part. I have all the coding just about done. I'm hoping for a progress video before the weekend, completion by Sunday if all goes well.

It looks like an ESP8266 works just fine which will make this able to run on battery power if you really want it to do so.

I have it working to read the map data from a web page, and my next step is to read the data via a JSON web query so that it can easily load in multiple games. I was worried about the memory needs to do all of that, but I want to give it a shot. If JSON doesn't work, I might have to go with a much simpler text file.

Can you tell us more about this esp module? Google says it's WiFi, but I guess I'm not looking hard enough to see more?

The ESP8266 is an awesome microcontroller that has wifi and can be programmed with the Arduino IDE. In particular, I use SparkFun's ESP8266 Thing because it has all the pins broken out on a board with power and only costs $16.

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13231

It runs on 3.3 volts, only has a small number of GPIO pins, and its ADC resolution isn't the greatest. All of those features make it a great IoT chip to build around.

Not counting tools, solder, or wire, I think this will cost me about $60 or $70 when it's all done. Most of that cost is the laminating and dry mounting the map to foam core.

Here's the latest. With such a mature development environment as the Arduino IDE, there's a library for just about everything. The newest one I added to this project is ArduinoJSON. Now I don't have to write my own text parser to load the data from the web.

https://www.facebook.com/protomaker.io/videos/1641366692826459/

To dos:

Create button inputs for switching between games and refreshing the data from the web

Mount the LEDs to the map

Finalize how to edit and publish the data

This is beyond fantastic!

pasewi has it right. Way over the top in the best way. I love 'just because' undertakings. Can't wait to see it done!

FedEx Office botched their first attempt to dry-mount the map. It did not lay flat and looked awful. They offered to do a second one for free, and thankfully one of our other locals was willing to donate theirs to the cause. FedEx laminated it this time before dry-mounting it, and it looks fantastic. What's the best part though? Now I have one that I don't plan to use, so I can test a few different wiring and LED mounting solutions without ruining the good map.

I'm planning to use just a single button for the control. Short press will switch between games, long press will have it refresh the data from the web.

Since at least one person is working on a web-based management thing for CC, I'm going to keep the data management simple. I have a Google Sheet with the list of locations which then exports all the data to a JSON file which is downloaded by the ESP8266.

The big project this weekend is to mount the LEDs to the map. There are 25 LEDs with 6 pads that need to be soldered (just 3 on the last one since they daisy chain together in serial) for a total of 147 solder connections. Since troubleshooting that could be a nightmare, I'm going to test each one as I attach it to the map.

With nice weather, I spent my free time this weekend doing drone work, so I didn't get progress like I wanted. I have started trying different cuts on the botched map from Fed Ex. I think I need some sort of punch to really make even circles.

I decided to go with a 3D-printed circle to make a line and an exacto blade to cut the circle. They actually look pretty good. I'm thinking a Phase 2 modification will be to 3D print a holder for the Neopixels that also acts as a diffuser from the front.

I finished cutting the holes last night, and I managed to do it without any real damage to map! Every little slip of the knife made me cringe, but it came out okay in the end. I went with 15mm holes because then I can later 3D print some sort of diffuser and Neopixel holder. I flipped the foam core over, labeled each of the holes, and then penciled in the route of the circuit. The spreadsheet is a transformed version of the list of planets that controls the lights. My next step is to start soldering and mounting the Neopixels.

We decided to cancel our plans for the evening, so I threw on Real Genius and got to work on soldering the connections. Since I wanted to see how it looked without diffusers for the LEDs, I used some blue painters tape and attached them to the map with just a test pattern. I must say that they actually are turning out pretty good. I'm testing each Neopixel as I attach them because it will be much easier to fix or replace them if I discover one night working along the way. Tomorrow night I'm hoping to make a lot more progress.

I got 7 more done tonight, 10 total, 15 to go. I had one Neopixel with a bad data line, and it wouldn't feed through to the next one. So I had to desolder it, and remove it. After that happened, I'm testing data throughput after each soldering step, Neopixel and then next circuit segment.

The building phase of the project is complete! I'm planning to mount it at the store on Thursday this week.

I'll work on a blog post next week, but here are the parts, supplies, and skills necessary if you were to want to make your own.

Parts
ESP8266 Thing from Spark Fun ($15.95, https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13231 )
OLED yellow/blue display ($9.99, https://www.amazon.com/Diymall-Yellow-Serial-Arduino-Display/dp/B00O2LLT30/ )
Neopixel RGBW strip ($17.95, https://www.adafruit.com/products/2832 )
Micro USB wall charger ($12.90, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009STIJWA/ )

Supplies
1000 uF capacitor
560 and 10K Ohm resistors
Jumper wires
Push button
22 AWG bulk wire
Solder

Tools
Wire cutter
Wire stripper
Soldering iron
Hobby exacto knife
3D printed plastic disc, 15mm across
Computer (for programming and uploading to the ESP8266)

Services
Laminate and dry-mount map on foam core (unknown price because Fed Ex did it for free after they botched the first attempt)

Skills
Soldering
Cutting with the exacto knife

Time
I estimate that I spent a total of 20 hours on this project. The bulk of that was on cutting the holes and soldering the Neopixels, probably about 8 hours.

I remembered tonight a couple features I forgot to code. After 15 minutes of no button presses, it starts cycling the map through all the games every 15 seconds. It also auto-refreshes the data every hour so people that pass by will see changes.

This is truly awesome. I wish I had time to work on this kind of stuff. My only trip into maker stuff is when I turned my Raspberry pi in to a monitor for his 3d printer with Octopi and a webcam. And that was nothing compared to this. Again, I say "great job"!

Thanks! If you did decide to do your own, all the coding is already done. It's just the cutting and soldering to make it.

My daughter had a concert last Thursday, so I didn't mount the map as I had planned. But that gave me a chance today to clean up the wiring quite a bit. It now mounts nicely to the map. With a couple adhesive hooks, I should be able to mount the whole thing at the store this week, and we've got 3 of the 6 people for a second campaign to start.