“In this instructable I am going to show you how to make your own individually addressable LED hula hoop. Individually addressable means that each LED in the hoop can have a different color at the same time. I wanted to create some nice LED patterns and with individually addressable LEDs you have much more flexibility.
This was my first ever electronics project. As a first ever electronics project I can tell you that this was not an easy one. There were a lot of things to figure out and I wanted to share my discoveries with people who - like me when I started this project - don’t have a lot of experience with electronics. This results in a very long instructable because it is very detailed. Please don’t let this scare you off! If you are new to all this, the details will help you get through all the steps. You’ll have all the instructions right here and there is no need to look up things separately. If you are experienced, you can skip big chunks of the instructable so it won’t be such a long one for you!
So let’s get started!
List of materials:
- Transparent tube
- If you’re making a single hoop you need only 3m (order from NL): De Hoepelwinkel
- If you’re planning on making a lot of hoops you can buy in bulk (30m order from GB): Omega (get the biggest one: TYPP-3458-100 OD: 3/4”, 19mm; ID: 5/8”, 15.9mm)
- Tube connector stuff (push button, rivets, tube connector piece)
- For a single hoop: De Hoepelwinkel
- For lots of hoops:
- Connector piece (outer diameter (OD) of the connector piece must be the same as inner diameter (ID) of the tube) order from Fancy-tapes
- Rivets (get it at your local supply store)
- Pushbutton (get it at your local supply store)
- Batteries Rechargeable Ni-MH AAA batteries, 8 pieces. The greater the capacity the better. (For example: Batteries)
- Charger Ni-MH trickle charge 4 cells minimum, 8 cells maximum: Charger
- LED strip Digital strip, so that each LED can be controlled individually. Order from Aliexpress because it is so much cheaper and so far they all work great! Get the 5m 30 IP30 option. (You don’t need waterproof coating as the strip will be in the tube. Plus, it would take up too much space. Also, you don’t want 60 LED’s per meter because your batteries will run out twice as fast.) Note: this is the WS2812B but as I mentioned you could also go for WS2813.
- ATtiny85 chip: ATtiny85
- Base ATtiny85 chip: base (optional)
- Connectors: jack plug and jack bus
- Slide switch (for example this one)
- PCB hard paper
- Resistor 300 - 500 Ω (I use 430 Ω)
- CapacitorElco 100 µF
- Capacitor 100 nF
- Fuse 5v 5A
- Soldering wire: I use stiff wire (wire with a solid core) to connect the batteries. This will make it easier to handle, keep the batteries more in place, and easier to push the whole thing through the tube. I use flexible wire (soft core wire) for the connection between the PCB and the Jack bus, because the jack bus needs to be able to come out of the tube and be pushed back in to the tube easily. It is always good to stick to red wire for 5V, black or white for GND and other colours for data. It’s less confusing when you stick to conventions. I use 3-core wire for LED wire connections because it’s easy and keeps the wires together. This is optional though.
- Shrink sleeve: Put heat shrink wherever you can. It’s handy to get an assortment of heat shrink.
List of tools:
- Soldering iron
- Solder tin
- Third hand (optional but very useful)
- Multimeter
- Drill
- Dremel (with milling head, saw blade and sanding head)
- Rivet pliers
- Arduino Uno (and connection cable)
- Arduino IDE (installed on your computer)
- Capacitor 10 µF (this is needed when using the Arduino to upload code onto the ATtiny85)
- Jumper wires
- Breadboard
- Battery holder 4pcs (optional)
- Battery charger (optional)”