This project aims at providing an easy to use solution for building your own MoonBoard LED system. It is both compatible with a normal MoonBoard as well as with the MoonBoard Mini. You need an Arduino Nano 33 BLE, a WS2811 LED string with 25 cm wire length, and an appropriate power source.
If you want a product that just works, please buy the one offered by Moon Climbing! This is a project which requires some work and still might not work as well as the original. To be absolutely clear: This project is provided as-is. I take absolutely no responsibility that it works as expected. In fact, it might break at any time. You have been warned!
All the heavy lifting in this project is done by two awesome libraries: NeoPixelBus (for the LED string) and HardwareBLESerial (for BLE functionality). They make it possible to keep this project quite short, easy to understand, and easily maintainable.
- Download and install Visual Studio Code.
- Install PlatformIO in Visual Studio Code.
- Download and open this project.
- Adjust to your needs (LED mapping, brightness).
- Compile and flash to an Arduino Nano 33 BLE.
- Use the MoonBoard app to connect to the Arduino and show the problems on your board!
The most common LED wiring pattern (here for a MoonBoard Mini) goes like this (front view):
- start bottom left (A1),
- up the column (to A12),
- one column to the right (to B12),
- all the way down (to B1),
- one column to the right (to C1),
- and repeat.
The MoonBoard App encodes holds in the same way. Hold A1 is 0, hold A2 is 1, hold A3 is 2 and so on.
The array ledmapping[] is used to map hold numbers to LED numbers. You can use custom wiring patterns if necessary. The standard mapping is n-->n (e.g. hold #0 is LED #0, hold #1 is LED #1 and so on).
- Wiring: Usually, blue is GND/negative, brown is positive, yellow/green is data. Please double-check! It might be a good idea to use a resistor (e.g. 330 ohms) in the data line!
- Never power the Arduino only when it's connected to the LED string without powering the LED string! This might destroy the first LED!
- The Arduino does not need to be shutdown, you can simply unplug the power source! This is (at least for me) a big improvement when compared to a Raspberry Pi based solution.
