LED Halloween Light Show

Sept 2019 - Oct 2019

LabView Design and Analysis: Data Aquisition

My groupmates and I were tasked with creating an LED light show for the Halloween holiday using an Arduino board and LabView. The main objective was to build a structural model and sync small LED lights to either sound or music, displaying a Halloween story.

We chose to replicate the classic Oogie Boogie scene from Nightmare Before Christmas. With cardboard, hot-glue, and electrical tape, I built an igloo-like dome to simulate the scene and create a stage for our light show. Each person in my group was tasked with a certain job for the project, however, we all helped each other to solder over 30 LED lights to wire to adequately connect to the breadboards that were hidden either behind the structure or underneath it. I had also hand-sewn the two dolls representing Santa Claus and Oogie Boogie.

Structural Base

Soldering Wires and LED Lights

Handmade Santa Claus and Oogie Boogie

We utilized LabView and its connection to the Arduino to control the LEDs according to the various frequency thresholds of the song file. As a result, we programmed some lights to turn on and off if the frequency of the song went above a certain threshold. Other lights were also programmed to blink at certain time intervals.

We wanted to make our project more interesting, so I took on the challenge to program a DC motor. In our chosen scene, Santa Claus is seen spinning on top of a roulette wheel, so I wanted to recreate the same thing. By placing the Santa Claus doll on top of the DC motor, I used LabView to program the motor to spin for a certain amount of iterations automatically, meaning the motor would start and stop to the song file. I was also successfully able to control the direction and speed of the DC motor by altering its duty cycle within LabView.

Shown below is the circuit diagram and LabView code to control the motor manually and automatically.

DC Motor Circuit Diagram with Arduino Board

LabView Code to Manually Control DC Motor

LabView Code to Automatically Control DC Motor

As the DC motor was not required for the project, and out of the scope of the lesson plan, we had impressed both the instructor and teaching assistants.

Shown below is a short video and written report of the finished project.

Enjoy!

Final Report