Arduino brings birthday cake to life
A good birthday cake is all about decoration. Usually this comes in the form of fancy frosting, fondant flourishes and crazy candles. What if you were part of electronics? That's the question Natasha Dzurny answered when she used an Arduino to bring a birthday cake to life with epic LED lighting.
The WS2812B Individually Addressable RGB LEDs, commonly referred to by Adafruit's "NeoPixel" trade name, are unique in that a user can control the color and brightness of each LED in a string via a single data cable. Each LED passes data to the next, with control commands going to the addressed LED. The user can control as many LEDs as they want using a single digital I/O pin on a microcontroller.
In this case, Dzurny used two Adafruit 8×32 flexible NeoPixel arrays and a NeoPixel strip. The dies display animations and messages, while the NeoPixel strip sits atop the cake to accent a small disco ball. An Arduino Nano 33 IoT board controls all of these LEDs using the Adafruit GFX library. But while hundreds of LEDs can share a single data line, power distribution is more complicated and Dzurny had to break power injection points.
The cool thing about using the NeoPixel dies for a cake is that Dzurny was able to cover them with a thin layer of white fondant, which acts as a natural diffuser that blends in perfectly in design. The messages are clearly visible, but partygoers won't even notice the LEDs under the fondant when they're off.
A good birthday cake is all about decoration. Usually this comes in the form of fancy frosting, fondant flourishes and crazy candles. What if you were part of electronics? That's the question Natasha Dzurny answered when she used an Arduino to bring a birthday cake to life with epic LED lighting.
The WS2812B Individually Addressable RGB LEDs, commonly referred to by Adafruit's "NeoPixel" trade name, are unique in that a user can control the color and brightness of each LED in a string via a single data cable. Each LED passes data to the next, with control commands going to the addressed LED. The user can control as many LEDs as they want using a single digital I/O pin on a microcontroller.
In this case, Dzurny used two Adafruit 8×32 flexible NeoPixel arrays and a NeoPixel strip. The dies display animations and messages, while the NeoPixel strip sits atop the cake to accent a small disco ball. An Arduino Nano 33 IoT board controls all of these LEDs using the Adafruit GFX library. But while hundreds of LEDs can share a single data line, power distribution is more complicated and Dzurny had to break power injection points.
The cool thing about using the NeoPixel dies for a cake is that Dzurny was able to cover them with a thin layer of white fondant, which acts as a natural diffuser that blends in perfectly in design. The messages are clearly visible, but partygoers won't even notice the LEDs under the fondant when they're off.
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