Those moving lights on the ceiling; imagine that only instead of triggered randomly, it's triggered by the activity LED on an ethernet port. So when you send a print to one of the 3d printers, you can actually "see" the data move from the computer to the printer.
Nicely done, Bob! Window Alert ideas: 1) Low Filament - red and orange chase 2) Print Error - orange and white chase 3) Print 95% Complete - green and white chase 4) Print 100 % Complete - solid green 5) Doorbell - purple and white chase 6) On a call - solid yellow 7) Do Not Disturb - solid red (and change wifi status to red and white alternating) The Name l'atelier - French for "The Workshop" Bespin - Star Wars Holodeck - Star Trek Purgos - Tron
Because the LEDs are individually addressable, you could horizontally (or radially) section the window into 5 segments representing each printer. That way the window can give the same information above but also indicate which printer the information is from.
@@beaver.hacker EXACTLY!! Same thoughts here. Including the color codes suggested by @JohnHuber1898!! Well not the exact same color coding but using it for internal functions of the room! Some great minds here, not counting myself. Thanks for sharing and giving me the opportunity to thumbs up those suggestions!
Very fun room. Indicator idea: add some LED strips that go towards the center of the window (orthogonally to the edges of the window) to act as 'bar graphs' for each printer - they could 'count up' to indicate print progress, or 'count down' to indicate print time remaining, or filament remaining, or time remaining before a service interval, or whatever.
I was thinking something like this as well. A status ring to a 3D printer. Have the window light turn blue gradually and once it’s complete turn green. Then you limit the amount of time you enter minimizing dust.
Went nuts when I saw your video years ago about automating a dust collection system. Super amazing to see how unbelievably far you’ve gone with your channel and skills! Please don’t ever stop!
Someone's probably already said this, but lighting acrylic from the side won't do much, you have to etch something into it for it to catch the light. You'd probably need a larger or different laser than the one you have, but you could etch different images on the acrylic then light it in different colors for when it's printing, stopped, maybe even include a button you press near the printer to show you've removed the print, or for whatever other device you're using at the time. I really hope it isn't the last time we see this room and any upgrades to it. I REALLY want a room like this now, especially with the "data" lights on the ceiling. Being a lighting nerd, this is truly amazing, it'd be awesome to see it in person some day.
Electrician here, they sell PRE defused LED strips now, just found them myself not too long ago. In addition they also sell diffuser channel that you can lay the LEDs into. Both options work great
I usually don't comment cause it'll get buried, but with the flickering, the esp will put out a 3.3v data line. The led strips want 5v, so can flicker. If you get a logic level shifter (very cheap), you can take the 3.3v data line and increase it to 5v which looses the flickering.
I always add a logic level shifter in my led projects...except when I forget 😅 and sometimes it still works okay, why does it sometime works (without the logic level shifter) is something I would like to learn... 😀😉
We feed the microcontroller with 5v wich gets stepped down to 3.3 and then back up to 5v? I always split the powercable into a part that feeds the microcontroller and use a solid-state-relay to feed the led. The adapter used to feed has enough amps to power the leds without hickups... Try and see if it works for you
You could also put a single LED with the same protcoll in the data line in front of the strip and pull its V_in down to 4.7V. The Chip in the LED will then work with the 3.3V from the ESP8266 as a "HIGH" Signal is given when V_d+ > V_in*0.7 : So originally the LED would need 5V * 0.7 = 3.5V to notice a "HIGH" signal. With a modified V_in of 4.7V it only needs 4.7V * 0.7 = 3.29V to detect a HIGH Signal. So 3.3 from the ESP8266 would be enough. The point of all of this is, that the D_out of the "Dummy LED" does send at it's V_in which would be 4.7V. Congrats you just build yourself a 0.1 Cent Levelshifter. Pulling down the V_in of the Dummy-LED is as easy a putting a diode in front of the V_in of the LED.
Long time listener, first time caller! For the LED status you can probably poll Home Assistant for paused or error jobs on the 3D printers- Bambu has a HA plugin which would be pretty easy, not sure about those Prusa printers. Cool video too- you had very different and creative ways of doing the chasers, the ceiling, and the portal lights.
Bob's reaction laugh at 6:05 is completely worth the price of admission. I hope it was done in one take, because it sounds like it. Fantastic project, Bob. I'm "outside your target demographic" as a 65 year old woman who has found a love of watching makers in the last 10 years. You and This Old Tony are my faves. I saw the original Tron the week of the theatre release in 1982. I was 22, loved Bruce Boxleitner, Jeff Bridges and SciFi. Anyway, this project is a total win from the Tron perspective; WAY better result than I hoped for. Well done, you!
I'm not quite as old so I only saw Tron on TV or video, and whilst I'm an avid watcher of makers I'm also a maker girl. Bob is one of my favourites, along with Stillbeast Studios and a number of others. I LIKE TO MAKE STUFF TOO!!
The TRONics Room I thought you originally planned to use edge lit engravings to light up messages on the window? If you could get printer status messages on the window, it would be cool. This could maybe be accomplished with an inset ring about 3-4 inches wide. Light up the type of status “finished” and then have numbers “1” “2” etc. changing the intensity of light could leave the numbers semi-visible or clearly lit.
By far my favorite utility display for LED accent strips is a clock. Especially good for places that do not have enough natural light to give you a rough sense of time. Mine went dim red when I should be asleep and cycled through the rainbow on a schedule during waking hours. I started from an even split around 3 hours per color and I fudged some to align with daily milestones like the work day.
Forbi deserves a raise. The edit on the video was 10/10. The music and B-roll were so good!! Very cool topic and it is awesome to see the space coming together!!!
For edge lighting accents clear acrylic, I've had good luck with putting white paint into whatever grooves are made in order to really make it pop with the edge light. You could also mask the sheet, laser/route off the areas, then blast it with white spray paint to catch the light. Another option is applying white vinyl, though it can be difficult to apply w/o any bubbles.
the Tron world is called The Grid, so in keeping with that theme while still making standalone, you could call it either the "Geometry Engine" or "Voxel Matrix" as it's mainly a 3D printer occupied room... which if you think about it, is generating "geometry" or creating a "voxel" using the data you feed it.
For the room I would suggest "Dashroom", for the indicators using the led stripe in the window, there are many ideas also given in many comments of this video, the only thing I would add is that as the led stripe is a series of segments, you can use each segment depending on its location around the window to give an indication about the location equivalent of each equipment, for the sections left can be use to give weather indications blinking for rain, red when it hit a temp threshold, blue when it's cold, also could indicate if your phone is ringing urgent calls while you've put it to silent....etc etc etc
This is exactly what I came to say! Connect the lights and printers to Home Assistant (if connectivity is available) and it’s super easy to change the light color when any printer finishes (or have a specific color per printer)!
I came to say this too! You could also add LED strips around the base of each printer to indicate the print status. Green for complete, Yellow for In Progress, Blue for Idle, maybe Red if the printer stops mid print. This would all take a lot of programming though.
@@AgentJ1314 If he used WLED and the printers were connected to home assistant via OctoPrint, it's VERY easy to do exactly what you stated! Not sure all of the printers can be connected to OctoPrint though.
Such a cool, inspiring room in which to work. Idea on the lights - It can be a bit jarring to all of a sudden see someone standing in my shop when I'm wearing headphones and running tools. It would be cool to have the lights act as proximity sensors, like in a movie. Gradually turn a specific color when someone has entered the space. Could be tied to a door or a laser grid across the stairs.
You wanted some suggestions so here goes. Static build up on the shop side of the window: I hear that there are a number of "anti-static" acrylic cleaners that leave a transparent film that reduces static build up on acrylic surfaces. Programs to add to the window lights: An indicator when one of the printers runs out of filament or has an error that stops it from working. Depending on how responsive the LED strip is, you might even be able to code it to light up a specific section so you can determine which one is faulting. A timer function, perhaps a button you can press in the room that starts a specific count down timer so that when the count down ends, it will flash a specific color or series of colors. For fun, a function that sends a pulse of different colored light around the edge of the window starting at a random location and going to a random location. (Not sure if you would be able to send it past the end/begining of the line, but that would make it look better.) Interesting things to put in the window. Or around the room: Spray painting or etching circuit board patterns on the wall and window. (For added effect, you could stack multiple different patterns on the window or in different colors on the wall) if they were painted with blacklight/florescent paint the blacklight lamp would have greater effect. (One of the long bar lamps would cast more light and give a greater effect.) There are several vehicles in the Tron franchise (such as the recognizer) that could be easily duplicated with either 3D printing or made flat and cut out of etched acrylic. By running belts or fishing line attatched to motors you could give them the illusion of moving around the room. A small projector could be used with an angled piece of acrylic to project ghost images of code running across the window. (This could also give you status updates on things in the room.) A second or third set of LED similar to the first can be placed behind the first and can sandwich layers of etched acrylic letting you light different sections with different light.
An idea for you to think about: You can engrave a message/symbol into acrylic and use LEDs pointing into the top/bottom of the acrylic to illuminate the message. Like "Print complete" - Look at "acrylic led signs".
That looks so cool!!! You could use the window lights to notify you when a 3D print is completed. The Arena or the Grid are both room names that harken back to Tron. I also like The Lab
Anything "Tron" based is automatically awesome :) Indicator suggestion - if your 3D printers are wifi connected, maybe use it to display print status? If you have access to the "% complete" of a job, you could use that to colour that % of the lights green with the rest yellow or red. Or maybe just blink the whole thing green a few times when a print job completes?
Im sure others have already suggested this, but somehow linking the window to octoprint and having it blink green or have a green loop flash around the window would be cool to show you when a print is done, or have a red flash if you have spaghetti on a print. Definitely endless possibilities here, great build Bob!!!
You could set the direction randomly on the ceiling lights as well to make it look like information is being transmitted bidirectionally along the traces.
Maybe you could use the window LED strip as a progression bar. It would gradually go from blue to green all around the window until the entire print you are running is complete, then it could blink between blue and green. You could also have colour coded status updates if you are running several prints at once, each would have a colour. Or you could split your strip into sections whenever you run several prints: the one on the left is for the first priority printer, the one on the right for the second priority printer. Also have alerts show up, if you run out of filament, if the fumes get past a certain point etc, that could also overlay with the progress bar information and blink on top of the normal progression bar
Regarding the led strip not working with the ESP. Most addressable led strips run on 5V, but the ESP modules run on 3.3V. This usually does not give issues, but it is on the limit of a high signal for the addressable led strips, and you might have found the limit. The Arduino R4 has an ESP on it, but the IO comes from a 5V microcontroller on board, so you send the signals with 5V. To make an ESP reliably work you might with 5V addressable leds want to look into 3.3V to 5V level shifters for the signal line.
Or look into having a "sacrificial" led that gets 5v power and 3.3v signal, but it steps up the signal to 5v on the output of that first led/pixel. I've done it successfully several times and it's a bit less hassle than using a level shifter. Google "sacrificial led hackaday" and click the first result for a better explanation.
This ⬆️. Exactly what I was going to say. I actually had a problem with the ESP running too many relays. One to four relays worked fine, but I ran out of current heading up towards nine relays. I was making the world’s first WiFi menorah. 🤣
i've had the same problem years ago, i was running a strip of WS2112b leds, first i thought that this difference in the signal voltage was the problem, but then I connected both ground wires, from the ESP to the strip power supply, and it worked, flicker free since then!
The Pixels in the top of your window can be used to represent the time of day, via color, there could be several ways to do this. "simple way" have colors for 0-9, and 4 leds could show the time of day as colors via a direct digit to color. "harder way" have the color hue, attached to a in-out curve for the hour of the day, and a repeating g b fade for 0-60 for the minute incorporate red into the color for even/odd hours to make the more discernable,.
You could make the lights around the window be the indicator of the percent of progress of a print that's going on. Kind of like a circular progress wheel, if the print is half done, the light is halfway around the window. 👍
I cannot smash the like button enough. Now you just need to have the sound track from legacy play in the background. Something that would be cool to do is have something fire off as you walk into the room, kick off "The Grid" song, and have the lights pulse more aggressively everywhere, including the window. Another idea would be if you could setup something with all the printers to fire an error if a print failed to a receiver, and the window turns a color to indicate which printer needs attention.
To start: What an excellent idea, Bob. It' looks SO good. Envious! :) My vote for a name: Ortus. It's latin for birth / source / beginning. And it sounds kind of TRON-y. :) LUX would also be great.
I think you should buy a second hand 65-inch lcd tv. Remove the backlight and laminate the lcd screen itself to the glass. So whatever notification you want it could show it on the window
Glad you made the making and transformation of this room into two videos. Would actually love to see more details, like for example, where and how did you end up connecting the LED all around the room to power and where did you place the Arduinos.
Great video. You should call it Flynn's, like the arcade. And you can have the light around the window react to a "ring' from your front door. If someone pushes the doorbell, the light in your window can respond and you will be notified when you are down there.
For window display: 1. TH-cam uploads 2. Personal task manager tracker for next video. Progressive lights 3. 3d printer status of large printer or favorite printer. 4. Air quality monitor 5. Combination light: wifi status plus printer status to check every 10min
Yeah, this all looks fantastic! Always fun to see your process. For the indicators: what if you have sections at the bottom of your window that each indicate something different. Bonus: 3D print little icons to represent each status (wifi, printing, streaming, etc). Cheers!
@14:35 🤣First off hilarious, secondly, thank you so much for including this kind of moment, so real. Thank you for all the awesome content and inspiration. 👍 Room name suggestion: "The Grid" (Also a great song from the Tron Legacy Album)
For the ceiling lights, I'd program some lights randomly going back the other direction, so it looks like days being written and read from different sectors. Could do data monitoring on your network or a specific device, so with high network traffic it plays the animation faster/more often, and the default animation with low/no network activity. For the window, you could do air quality monitoring, if an air quality sensor in the clean room reads above a certain value, it flashes the lights on and off in the window red (and maybe the wall light?). I would also add ventilation to that room, heated plastic gives off fumes that aren't healthy, so you want to be bringing in fresh outside air. Have the clean room be slightly higher pressure than the rest of your house so that dust gets blown out of the room instead of being sucked in through the door.
We had an extra bedroom that required walking through the workshop. There was always a slight layer of dust/fine sawdust. If you want this room to actually be clean, you want to have a porch-like room to remove your shoes, and create a buffer. Also, you really need to seal every joint of the wood. Since you've already finished the room, you need to seal the seams surrounding the clean room. Especially the ceiling.
Here’s an idea for your indicator window: a progress bar! When you start a 3D print the whole window is red, but as the print progresses a section of the window turns blue, proportional to amount of printing completed. Then you can check at a glance how far along your print is without having to go into the room.
Laser etch some icons in the window acrylic at the bottom edge like 3d printer status, cnc machine status, internet status etc. Doesn't need to be big enough. Just enough so u can see from the far and the specific section of the light will change the colour as per the status of that specific system. And this etching makes the light pop out of acrylic very nicely.
For the window display, take advantage of the reflective property of the acrylic, and mount either individual LED's or LED strips out of view that reflect off the plexi when they are lit. (Akin to the Pepper's Ghost effect). That way you could have a "head's up display" visible from the main part of the shop, with indicators for various things. Maybe even use old PC monitors to display text or video, run it in reverse so that it "reads" correctly on the plexiglass. Video could be live feeds from your security cameras, or "minority report" style animations.
For the window lights, you can assign a color to each printer, when they are running, add that color to the mix that circles the window the same way the lights on the walls vary. Flash just that color when the printer completes a job for a minute or so. Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet....
Laser-cut or Dremel-engraved acrylic with frosted edges will glow when LEDs are pointed into them, you can use this to make some visible displays such as "print in progress" or "printer A idle" etc. Or just have neat little tron lines in the window, either-or.
Love the Tron look, but you have got to do something with the outlets and pipe for the electrical. They just clash with the room. An idea would be to 3d print some outlet covers, maybe use a combination of black filament and one that glows in the black light. You cover the pipes with more of the plastic you used to hold the lights. You could glue 3d print brackets inside the channels that use magnets to hold them to the pipes.
Couple of ideas for the window, put a window each side, but in the middle put a third piece that has pictures laser cut into it so the lights reflect off those pictures. Or some areas with horizontal lines and the code reads how far through a print is and the lights light up the horizontal lines to make it easier to see how close to finished the print jobs are while working on the outside.
I love it Bob, I'd like to see scrolling text on the window with various bits of information. e.g. Machine status, family schedule, ticker info (sports, financial), or any other types of notifications you have on your phone or watch. As for a name, I simply like - "The Lab"
For the indicator, you could easily assign certain section to relate to specific things inside the room, and each section could have a color that means something different. Could put text on the acrylic (in an on-theme way) that identifies each one.
I like the movement on the ceiling. Would be cool if it continued down the wall to each piece of equipment. I like MurphySidekic's idea of having the window be a progress indicator for one or all of the printers in the room. Perhaps having light strips at each station that shows it's in operation with something that would indicate its progress in the window. Room name suggestion: The Codex
Love it! Would maybe recommend a air purity sensor of some sorts, and have that reflect on to the window. I know when running my printers, the room can get warm, stuffy and probably a little toxic without air circulating and being filtered. that being said, some sort of air filtration, a duct like a bathroom fan or something similar is something I would add into this room. Good work, and inspiring as always!
For indicators you could get a frosted vinyl sticker and place them around the borders of the windows. Then selectively change those regions' colors based on what happening. For example printer 1 logo , green = running, red = error, blue = standby, green flash = print complete. Wifi logo in the upper corner. Would also be cool if you could put a spinning hologram display. On a wall or recessed in the window would be cool. Could be a clock, text notifications, sub count, etc
Use your laser to etch a design inside an acrylic tile. Mount the tile to cover a section of the lights. Program that section to change color when the thing happens. If your internet goes out, the internet tile will light glow red. Email, regular mail, unlimited options
A few ideas: 3D printer status indicators. You could cut some "frosted glass" vinyl into some representation of each printer and use the sidlit LEDs to change the color of those. Doorbell Flashing Decibel monitor for the woodshop A slow moving dot in the LED strip could be enough to tell rough time, if it tracks like an hour hand. Home assistant probably has the ability to integrate a lot of this. Oh, and you should use the window to do "minority report" effects for your videos.. a bit more sci-fi just for fun.
The grid. You’re stepping into a place filled with technology. A little on the nose, yes, but you’ve already committed to Tron. You might as well commit 100%.
Window Idea - Use the UV markers to write a message on the window for a particular type of notification, e.g 'Printer Finished'. Then use the LED's to emit UV/purple in certain sections that correspond to the physical location of the message so that only that message lights up. Room Name Idea - Tron Lab? Or, a room I've called elsewhere - Helix Lab. Helix being an incline orbiting around a central plane.. As in the central plane is an idea, the helix are ideas, discussions, debates etc that revolve, evolve and move around that central thought/idea.
You can add small acrylic sheets with symbols, maybe print finished, print issue, filament empty, etc. you could etc the symbols onto little 2x2 acrylic squares, when the LEDs turn specific colors under them, they will glow or pulse indicating whatever status is lit up or pulsing. maybe line them up with each section of LED. the rest can pulse blue and white, and that section can pulse green or red or whatever, you could even potentially have a small servo slide the sheets off and on the LEDS so they aren't constantly being lit up
For the window, maybe put acrylic pieces, with a label on them that is edge lit by a specific group of LED's with a specific colour. These can be mounted around the window for various indicators.
You could turn the led around the window into a loading bar for 3D prints. You could do that a couple different ways. 1.) when print is at 0% the light bar is off, but as it prints slowly more lights fill up around the window. 50% the light will only be on half the window. 100% the whole light bar is filled up. 2.) if you want to utilize the whole window during the entire charge you could designate a colour gradient to determine percentage. Red is 0%, green is 50% and blue is 100%. As it charges between each colour, it slowly mixes the colours so you’ll still have some fidelity of percentage. Or you could make it a more analogous colour scheme that starts at white and ends at red.
For the lights id say air quality but i think you already did that. Without knowing how the room is for you its hard to know what would be good, but; -temperature (doesn't look like you've got any aircon in there, i know its the basement but maybe it gets hot?) -react to noise inside/outside the room. For this there are two uses, it could react to noise inside so it moves with music or perhaps even just the printer noises - could be cool. Or you point the mic outside and if someone calls you from outside the room it reacts to let you know. -Days of the week - now this is more for how I work. So often I'll forget which day we're on. I've made myself a little desk clock and despite having the day written on there already I found it helped me to just add a little colour scheme for days (today is blue for the monday blues)
I could you see you incorporating more ideas from Tron for this room! Maybe the landscapes and shapes, or characters. Maybe call it the "Master Control Room". When you open the door or start printing, have it where a smart speaker plays music from the soundtrack. A great idea for the window light indicator would be to let you know when your printing jobs are done. Such an awesome room!
I feel that the window would work best as an indicator for a finished print with different colors or patterns for each seperateprinter. It would also be great to call the room "Tron 3D" or "ElectroLife"
Led indicator idea: Workshop side: 1.~ tool battery charging station where chargers placed side by side on a shelf mounted below the lower window edge and indicate the charger status by same led width as the chargers are placed underneath... 2.0 ~ same principle but instead mounting the chargers top down on a shelf, making a charging station baseplate placing them in line from top to bottom and mounting the complete charging wall-board directly on the wall along one of the two vertical edges beside the window. electronics room side: 2.1 ~ doing the same as described in point 2. But for electronic specific chargers (e.g. 18650...) along the oposite vertical edge as in point 2. So by doing 2.0 & 2.1 you would always have an overview of the status of the batteries on the left and right led window edges, no matter which room you are in, and know immediately as soon as your tool battery is fully charged so that you can use it or swap it out to charge the second battery. The same applies to the electronics room charging station for 18650 or similar batteries. Hope this could spray some inspiration ☺️🙏🏻 Keep thinkering✌🏻🤓
I think it could be useful to see a progression bar in the window depending on the percentage of completion for whatever 3D printer you’re utilizing at the moment!
print complete from printer 1 notification - one chasing pattern for a couple minutes. print complete from printer 2 or laser or whatever, - different chase pattern for a couple minutes. amazon delivery - pattern 3... notification 4... pattern 4, etc. If you can make the chase patterns work together and just build a longer "train" of specific light patterns or colors that chase around the window for a minute every 5-10 minutes until you clear the notifications. Not sure what the notification management side looks like, but thats what id use the window for.
Idea: You can install a switch on your printers and add an end point in prints to tap the switch. Once the switch receives a value you can tell a portion of the windows leds to turn a specific color (maybe each printer gets its own color). Then you can assign a specific section to the printers and have different zones for other notifications.
Idea for window- find a projector or set one up to display information like time or words on a corner, and bonus for it to mirror its content for when you are out of the room, so it reads the right way. Might be difficult with the clear windows, but would be super cool!
Re the Window, indicating print progress or 3d print completion etc would be a good use for it. I like the fact that different colours can have different meanings.
For the window, give each 3d printer a color, and then use the strip around the windows as a loading / progress bar for how long a print has to complete. light up half way is 50% done and so-on. then cycle the colors to show the status of each printer if there is more than one print going at a time
Two suggestions: - you might want to look at old Tron video game arcade cabinets for inspiration to use partial reflections to get a transparent image. I think the technique is called "Pepper's Ghost". I seem to recall the arcade cabinets using that. - some of the imagery of the Tron movies was the sense of vast empty spaces. Making some kind of parallax effect perhaps, or false perspective, might help to drive home the Tron feeling you're going for. Maybe make a false window opposite the real one, that looks out on an empty space?
If you ever remake the blacklight fixture, try using two concentric cylinders that rotate at different speeds and/or rotate the opposite direction. Also, it looks like the lightbulb might be directing a lot of light upwards. If your foil doesn't reflect that well, maybe put a 45 degree reflector above it and do something different with your cylinders at that level, leveraging the more concentrated light.
Something to display in the "window": dark blue with single light blue lights that "fall" on the edge -> when it is going to rain within the hour. If you have stuff outside, you know you need to put everything inside. This is better then running trough the rain carrying heavy stuff. We've all been there... Also a notification when it is getting too late. If you are like me, you forget time from time to time.
For the windows I think would be interesting to have another layer of acrylic that is like puzzle with etched icons that can be lighted up from the side. This means you would have low budget holographic display. You can have icon for each of your printers that is normally just dark, so it’s not that noticeable in the window, but lights orange for printing and green for done. It is a lot of work, but it might look super cool.
the window LEDs could make a sick progress bar, like yellow LEDs with a progressive bar of blue as prints are progressing, could even do specific sections of LEDs along the top of the window that flip from red to yellow to green for "there's a problem" "print is pending" "print is done" respectively
I would use the corners as indicators for each of the printers. Orange for Printing, Red for failed print, green for completed print and each printer would be the corners, but the entire strip could indicate the LARGE printer as well. That would be for 5 devices. You could add more to the program such as new devices, in the center portion of the straight runs as well.
As far as the window information goes, there is a device I use in my office called a Blink(1) , It is a usb controlled rgb led, and the program allows you to check for new messages online as well as color code them, so email, social media, and several other programmable checks, plus it is open source. I swapped the lone led for a strip, and have the strip running around my desk, so color coded notifications whenever I have messages. to do the multi layer window, I would separate the 3 color channels and give them each a lone track in the window. so the track you have now for full rgb control, then a red, blue, and green stand alone track. that would let you etch an individual piece of acrylic with whatever pattern you want, and light up just that panel when you have the designated notification come through.
in the window you should overlay separate pieces of acrylic in funky shapes, one for each device in the room. you can puzzle them into the window and have led indicators show print progress or flash error codes such as filament out.
If it were my room, I'd call it the Bacta Tank or BacTa. Clean room, construction/reconstruction area. Plus the view from the woodworking area into the window makes it really look like a bacta tank. Star Wars reference for a Tron room, I know but it's a win for all of us geeks.
One funny but fitting reference to name the room could be the 'Light Tank'. I thought it was funny cuz it could refer to how it's enclosed and like a fish tank, but also because there is light streaming all throughout it making it a full blown Tron tank.
since its running on an ESP one idea is to pivot to running EPSHome on the controller and stand up a Home Assistant server. Its a bit of work to get going but then the sky is the limit for connectivity. For instance there is an Octoprint component that would talk to the 3D printers. Awesome Project!
Idea: use the strip in the window as a status bar for your 3D prints. Change the color along the strip at the progress changes. Like the advertisement countdowns in your own videos.
You can use the old ESP and run WLED on it. Connect it to your home automation environment such as home assistant and now you can use the lights not only for internet outage, but also other status indication.
Those moving lights on the ceiling; imagine that only instead of triggered randomly, it's triggered by the activity LED on an ethernet port. So when you send a print to one of the 3d printers, you can actually "see" the data move from the computer to the printer.
That’s such a neat idea!
@@theweirdsquid Thanks!! I'm actually attempting it right now. Just gotta wait for the LED strip to show up :-)
I had a similar thought! But how do you capture the status of the activity LED?
Easiest way? probably a photodetector/photoresistor stuck right next to the activity led.
@@christianp1788that's pretty clever
Nicely done, Bob!
Window Alert ideas:
1) Low Filament - red and orange chase
2) Print Error - orange and white chase
3) Print 95% Complete - green and white chase
4) Print 100 % Complete - solid green
5) Doorbell - purple and white chase
6) On a call - solid yellow
7) Do Not Disturb - solid red (and change wifi status to red and white alternating)
The Name
l'atelier - French for "The Workshop"
Bespin - Star Wars
Holodeck - Star Trek
Purgos - Tron
Because the LEDs are individually addressable, you could horizontally (or radially) section the window into 5 segments representing each printer.
That way the window can give the same information above but also indicate which printer the information is from.
Maybe also CO2, TEMP & HUMIDITY levels?
@@beaver.hacker EXACTLY!! Same thoughts here. Including the color codes suggested by @JohnHuber1898!! Well not the exact same color coding but using it for internal functions of the room! Some great minds here, not counting myself. Thanks for sharing and giving me the opportunity to thumbs up those suggestions!
Very fun room. Indicator idea: add some LED strips that go towards the center of the window (orthogonally to the edges of the window) to act as 'bar graphs' for each printer - they could 'count up' to indicate print progress, or 'count down' to indicate print time remaining, or filament remaining, or time remaining before a service interval, or whatever.
this 100% ^
came to say the same thing. this is a winner right here. but find a way to make all of them happening 😀
I was gonna say to use the window as a timer for the remaining print time, but this might be even better!
I was thinking something like this as well. A status ring to a 3D printer. Have the window light turn blue gradually and once it’s complete turn green. Then you limit the amount of time you enter minimizing dust.
There could also be a unique color if the printer controller detects a failed print
Went nuts when I saw your video years ago about automating a dust collection system. Super amazing to see how unbelievably far you’ve gone with your channel and skills! Please don’t ever stop!
Same experience for me too
You could set it to indicate someone’s ringing the doorbell! It could be tough to hear when you’re working away in the basement.
Or just do like we do and ignore the doorbell.
@@RetroHGenX Lol yeah or that! Haha
Oh I remember there are also these for your cell phones ringing, because in high noise environments you can't actually hear your calls etc..
How would you detect the firing of a normal doorbell? The ESP32's inbuilt hall sensor?
@@ativerc probably not a normal doorbell but more like a Ring or Google Nest. Bob has a smart home that’s why I thought of that.
Someone's probably already said this, but lighting acrylic from the side won't do much, you have to etch something into it for it to catch the light. You'd probably need a larger or different laser than the one you have, but you could etch different images on the acrylic then light it in different colors for when it's printing, stopped, maybe even include a button you press near the printer to show you've removed the print, or for whatever other device you're using at the time.
I really hope it isn't the last time we see this room and any upgrades to it. I REALLY want a room like this now, especially with the "data" lights on the ceiling. Being a lighting nerd, this is truly amazing, it'd be awesome to see it in person some day.
You could etch a Tron pattern into the window. All of the lines will light up and look awesome.
Since this is a Tron theme you can call it "The Grid".
YES YES YES to both ideas!!!
The Grid is what I came here to say. Big +1👆
Great minds... the Grid was the first thing to pop for me.
Yup! Perfect name!
The Grid!
Electrician here, they sell PRE defused LED strips now, just found them myself not too long ago. In addition they also sell diffuser channel that you can lay the LEDs into. Both options work great
I usually don't comment cause it'll get buried, but with the flickering, the esp will put out a 3.3v data line. The led strips want 5v, so can flicker. If you get a logic level shifter (very cheap), you can take the 3.3v data line and increase it to 5v which looses the flickering.
I always add a logic level shifter in my led projects...except when I forget 😅 and sometimes it still works okay, why does it sometime works (without the logic level shifter) is something I would like to learn... 😀😉
This is a very probable cause for the flickering - noise on the 3.3V data line while the LEDs expect 5V levels.
We feed the microcontroller with 5v wich gets stepped down to 3.3 and then back up to 5v? I always split the powercable into a part that feeds the microcontroller and use a solid-state-relay to feed the led. The adapter used to feed has enough amps to power the leds without hickups... Try and see if it works for you
You could also put a single LED with the same protcoll in the data line in front of the strip and pull its V_in down to 4.7V. The Chip in the LED will then work with the 3.3V from the ESP8266 as a "HIGH" Signal is given when V_d+ > V_in*0.7 :
So originally the LED would need 5V * 0.7 = 3.5V to notice a "HIGH" signal.
With a modified V_in of 4.7V it only needs 4.7V * 0.7 = 3.29V to detect a HIGH Signal. So 3.3 from the ESP8266 would be enough.
The point of all of this is, that the D_out of the "Dummy LED" does send at it's V_in which would be 4.7V. Congrats you just build yourself a 0.1 Cent Levelshifter.
Pulling down the V_in of the Dummy-LED is as easy a putting a diode in front of the V_in of the LED.
Long time listener, first time caller! For the LED status you can probably poll Home Assistant for paused or error jobs on the 3D printers- Bambu has a HA plugin which would be pretty easy, not sure about those Prusa printers. Cool video too- you had very different and creative ways of doing the chasers, the ceiling, and the portal lights.
Bob's reaction laugh at 6:05 is completely worth the price of admission. I hope it was done in one take, because it sounds like it. Fantastic project, Bob. I'm "outside your target demographic" as a 65 year old woman who has found a love of watching makers in the last 10 years. You and This Old Tony are my faves. I saw the original Tron the week of the theatre release in 1982. I was 22, loved Bruce Boxleitner, Jeff Bridges and SciFi. Anyway, this project is a total win from the Tron perspective; WAY better result than I hoped for. Well done, you!
I love this! So glad you’re here.
I remember seeing Tron opening week too
The pure sound of success.😁
I'm not quite as old so I only saw Tron on TV or video, and whilst I'm an avid watcher of makers I'm also a maker girl. Bob is one of my favourites, along with Stillbeast Studios and a number of others. I LIKE TO MAKE STUFF TOO!!
I’m Bob’s sister and I love seeing other girl makers in the ILTMS family!
I love having clocks in my workspaces, I like the idea of the light illuminating in a clockwise or flashing in a way to signify the top of the hour
hmmm, that's a really cool idea!
The TRONics Room
I thought you originally planned to use edge lit engravings to light up messages on the window? If you could get printer status messages on the window, it would be cool. This could maybe be accomplished with an inset ring about 3-4 inches wide. Light up the type of status “finished” and then have numbers “1” “2” etc. changing the intensity of light could leave the numbers semi-visible or clearly lit.
I like this. TRONics, TRONica
By far my favorite utility display for LED accent strips is a clock.
Especially good for places that do not have enough natural light to give you a rough sense of time. Mine went dim red when I should be asleep and cycled through the rainbow on a schedule during waking hours. I started from an even split around 3 hours per color and I fudged some to align with daily milestones like the work day.
Forbi deserves a raise. The edit on the video was 10/10. The music and B-roll were so good!! Very cool topic and it is awesome to see the space coming together!!!
I liked the visualization of the LED segments too
The little details sprinkled through the video were so great!
For edge lighting accents clear acrylic, I've had good luck with putting white paint into whatever grooves are made in order to really make it pop with the edge light. You could also mask the sheet, laser/route off the areas, then blast it with white spray paint to catch the light. Another option is applying white vinyl, though it can be difficult to apply w/o any bubbles.
the Tron world is called The Grid, so in keeping with that theme while still making standalone,
you could call it either the "Geometry Engine" or "Voxel Matrix" as it's mainly a 3D printer occupied room... which if you think about it, is generating "geometry" or creating a "voxel" using the data you feed it.
That's what I was thinking. The Game Grid or just The Grid. "I gotta pick up some prints off the Grid" sounds pretty cool.
For the room I would suggest "Dashroom", for the indicators using the led stripe in the window, there are many ideas also given in many comments of this video, the only thing I would add is that as the led stripe is a series of segments, you can use each segment depending on its location around the window to give an indication about the location equivalent of each equipment, for the sections left can be use to give weather indications blinking for rain, red when it hit a temp threshold, blue when it's cold, also could indicate if your phone is ringing urgent calls while you've put it to silent....etc etc etc
You can display status of print finished on printer in green. It does not matter which printer, you just go and check either way 👍👍
This is exactly what I came to say! Connect the lights and printers to Home Assistant (if connectivity is available) and it’s super easy to change the light color when any printer finishes (or have a specific color per printer)!
Came to say this. You could number the printers and have a corresponding number of flashes to indicate which printer is finished
I came to say this too! You could also add LED strips around the base of each printer to indicate the print status. Green for complete, Yellow for In Progress, Blue for Idle, maybe Red if the printer stops mid print. This would all take a lot of programming though.
@@AgentJ1314 If he used WLED and the printers were connected to home assistant via OctoPrint, it's VERY easy to do exactly what you stated! Not sure all of the printers can be connected to OctoPrint though.
Gosh, can you imagine if he used Vantablack on the walls? Love how Tron is translated in the decor 🤩
Such a cool, inspiring room in which to work. Idea on the lights - It can be a bit jarring to all of a sudden see someone standing in my shop when I'm wearing headphones and running tools. It would be cool to have the lights act as proximity sensors, like in a movie. Gradually turn a specific color when someone has entered the space. Could be tied to a door or a laser grid across the stairs.
THE LAB is what came to mind 😀looks awesome!
Yes ❤
Was coming to comment the same thing
You wanted some suggestions so here goes.
Static build up on the shop side of the window:
I hear that there are a number of "anti-static" acrylic cleaners that leave a transparent film that reduces static build up on acrylic surfaces.
Programs to add to the window lights:
An indicator when one of the printers runs out of filament or has an error that stops it from working. Depending on how responsive the LED strip is, you might even be able to code it to light up a specific section so you can determine which one is faulting.
A timer function, perhaps a button you can press in the room that starts a specific count down timer so that when the count down ends, it will flash a specific color or series of colors.
For fun, a function that sends a pulse of different colored light around the edge of the window starting at a random location and going to a random location. (Not sure if you would be able to send it past the end/begining of the line, but that would make it look better.)
Interesting things to put in the window. Or around the room:
Spray painting or etching circuit board patterns on the wall and window. (For added effect, you could stack multiple different patterns on the window or in different colors on the wall) if they were painted with blacklight/florescent paint the blacklight lamp would have greater effect. (One of the long bar lamps would cast more light and give a greater effect.)
There are several vehicles in the Tron franchise (such as the recognizer) that could be easily duplicated with either 3D printing or made flat and cut out of etched acrylic. By running belts or fishing line attatched to motors you could give them the illusion of moving around the room.
A small projector could be used with an angled piece of acrylic to project ghost images of code running across the window. (This could also give you status updates on things in the room.)
A second or third set of LED similar to the first can be placed behind the first and can sandwich layers of etched acrylic letting you light different sections with different light.
An idea for you to think about: You can engrave a message/symbol into acrylic and use LEDs pointing into the top/bottom of the acrylic to illuminate the message. Like "Print complete" - Look at "acrylic led signs".
I thought about something similar to this - i was thinking along the lines of some icons or something, but the actual text is a great idea
It was the giggles for me. Means the room is doing what you hoped making you have that feeling, and that is the win!!
That looks so cool!!!
You could use the window lights to notify you when a 3D print is completed.
The Arena or the Grid are both room names that harken back to Tron. I also like The Lab
Anything "Tron" based is automatically awesome :)
Indicator suggestion - if your 3D printers are wifi connected, maybe use it to display print status? If you have access to the "% complete" of a job, you could use that to colour that % of the lights green with the rest yellow or red. Or maybe just blink the whole thing green a few times when a print job completes?
MCP - My Clean Place 🙃
Maker Chamber Printing
Im sure others have already suggested this, but somehow linking the window to octoprint and having it blink green or have a green loop flash around the window would be cool to show you when a print is done, or have a red flash if you have spaghetti on a print. Definitely endless possibilities here, great build Bob!!!
You could set the direction randomly on the ceiling lights as well to make it look like information is being transmitted bidirectionally along the traces.
Maybe you could use the window LED strip as a progression bar.
It would gradually go from blue to green all around the window until the entire print you are running is complete, then it could blink between blue and green. You could also have colour coded status updates if you are running several prints at once, each would have a colour. Or you could split your strip into sections whenever you run several prints: the one on the left is for the first priority printer, the one on the right for the second priority printer. Also have alerts show up, if you run out of filament, if the fumes get past a certain point etc, that could also overlay with the progress bar information and blink on top of the normal progression bar
Regarding the led strip not working with the ESP. Most addressable led strips run on 5V, but the ESP modules run on 3.3V. This usually does not give issues, but it is on the limit of a high signal for the addressable led strips, and you might have found the limit. The Arduino R4 has an ESP on it, but the IO comes from a 5V microcontroller on board, so you send the signals with 5V. To make an ESP reliably work you might with 5V addressable leds want to look into 3.3V to 5V level shifters for the signal line.
was going to say the same. 3.3v to 5v level shifter should solve it.
Or look into having a "sacrificial" led that gets 5v power and 3.3v signal, but it steps up the signal to 5v on the output of that first led/pixel. I've done it successfully several times and it's a bit less hassle than using a level shifter. Google "sacrificial led hackaday" and click the first result for a better explanation.
Also power injection to deal with line loss.
This ⬆️. Exactly what I was going to say. I actually had a problem with the ESP running too many relays. One to four relays worked fine, but I ran out of current heading up towards nine relays. I was making the world’s first WiFi menorah. 🤣
i've had the same problem years ago, i was running a strip of WS2112b leds, first i thought that this difference in the signal voltage was the problem, but then I connected both ground wires, from the ESP to the strip power supply, and it worked, flicker free since then!
The Pixels in the top of your window can be used to represent the time of day, via color, there could be several ways to do this.
"simple way" have colors for 0-9, and 4 leds could show the time of day as colors via a direct digit to color.
"harder way" have the color hue, attached to a in-out curve for the hour of the day, and a repeating g b fade for 0-60 for the minute incorporate red into the color for even/odd hours to make the more discernable,.
You could make the lights around the window be the indicator of the percent of progress of a print that's going on. Kind of like a circular progress wheel, if the print is half done, the light is halfway around the window. 👍
I cannot smash the like button enough. Now you just need to have the sound track from legacy play in the background.
Something that would be cool to do is have something fire off as you walk into the room, kick off "The Grid" song, and have the lights pulse more aggressively everywhere, including the window.
Another idea would be if you could setup something with all the printers to fire an error if a print failed to a receiver, and the window turns a color to indicate which printer needs attention.
To start: What an excellent idea, Bob. It' looks SO good. Envious! :) My vote for a name: Ortus. It's latin for birth / source / beginning. And it sounds kind of TRON-y. :) LUX would also be great.
Hey Bob, just wanted to let you know I think you did the right thing splitting it up in multiple videos. Turned out awesome!
I think you should buy a second hand 65-inch lcd tv. Remove the backlight and laminate the lcd screen itself to the glass. So whatever notification you want it could show it on the window
That was awesome! Loved the creative use of the black light to make those surfaces pop! Brilliant!
Name the room Master Control...a la the MCP from Tron
How about “The MCP Lab” ?
This or The Repository.
Glad you made the making and transformation of this room into two videos. Would actually love to see more details, like for example, where and how did you end up connecting the LED all around the room to power and where did you place the Arduinos.
Great video. You should call it Flynn's, like the arcade. And you can have the light around the window react to a "ring' from your front door. If someone pushes the doorbell, the light in your window can respond and you will be notified when you are down there.
For window display:
1. TH-cam uploads
2. Personal task manager tracker for next video. Progressive lights
3. 3d printer status of large printer or favorite printer.
4. Air quality monitor
5. Combination light: wifi status plus printer status to check every 10min
Room name: control center, room, or section 32
Add a centering line laser line to the other side of the black light stepper motor to make the look of something scanning the room.
Yeah, this all looks fantastic! Always fun to see your process.
For the indicators: what if you have sections at the bottom of your window that each indicate something different. Bonus: 3D print little icons to represent each status (wifi, printing, streaming, etc).
Cheers!
@14:35 🤣First off hilarious, secondly, thank you so much for including this kind of moment, so real. Thank you for all the awesome content and inspiration. 👍
Room name suggestion: "The Grid" (Also a great song from the Tron Legacy Album)
The Grid is a perfect name. I denotes electronics, which is what this room is for vs the wood shop which is less techy.
For the ceiling lights, I'd program some lights randomly going back the other direction, so it looks like days being written and read from different sectors. Could do data monitoring on your network or a specific device, so with high network traffic it plays the animation faster/more often, and the default animation with low/no network activity.
For the window, you could do air quality monitoring, if an air quality sensor in the clean room reads above a certain value, it flashes the lights on and off in the window red (and maybe the wall light?).
I would also add ventilation to that room, heated plastic gives off fumes that aren't healthy, so you want to be bringing in fresh outside air. Have the clean room be slightly higher pressure than the rest of your house so that dust gets blown out of the room instead of being sucked in through the door.
You could call the room the Enhanced Nano Clean Object Manufacturing room. Or ENCOM if you prefer.
that is GENIUS😮😮
I was going to suggest ENCOM too, but i was having a heck of a time reversing the anagram. Your suggestion is outstanding.
We had an extra bedroom that required walking through the workshop. There was always a slight layer of dust/fine sawdust. If you want this room to actually be clean, you want to have a porch-like room to remove your shoes, and create a buffer. Also, you really need to seal every joint of the wood. Since you've already finished the room, you need to seal the seams surrounding the clean room. Especially the ceiling.
The "Construct" springs to mind, like from the matrix. and because of the printers
Wrong franchise, but similar vibe I suppose
I know, but the grid seemed to much on the nose
Like, matrix printers? =)
@@groeneribbroek oh, I didn't think of that, works on many levels 😆
Here’s an idea for your indicator window: a progress bar! When you start a 3D print the whole window is red, but as the print progresses a section of the window turns blue, proportional to amount of printing completed. Then you can check at a glance how far along your print is without having to go into the room.
Laser etch some icons in the window acrylic at the bottom edge like 3d printer status, cnc machine status, internet status etc.
Doesn't need to be big enough. Just enough so u can see from the far and the specific section of the light will change the colour as per the status of that specific system.
And this etching makes the light pop out of acrylic very nicely.
yeeeah. Make it look like a heads up display.
For the window display, take advantage of the reflective property of the acrylic, and mount either individual LED's or LED strips out of view that reflect off the plexi when they are lit. (Akin to the Pepper's Ghost effect). That way you could have a "head's up display" visible from the main part of the shop, with indicators for various things. Maybe even use old PC monitors to display text or video, run it in reverse so that it "reads" correctly on the plexiglass. Video could be live feeds from your security cameras, or "minority report" style animations.
I like the name Print City. Simple and sounds somewhat futuristic but yet still realistic
For the window lights, you can assign a color to each printer, when they are running, add that color to the mix that circles the window the same way the lights on the walls vary. Flash just that color when the printer completes a job for a minute or so. Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet....
"If the internet goes out, like it does every single week...."
Oh, you have Comcast huh? 🤣😂🤣
Laser-cut or Dremel-engraved acrylic with frosted edges will glow when LEDs are pointed into them, you can use this to make some visible displays such as "print in progress" or "printer A idle" etc. Or just have neat little tron lines in the window, either-or.
Love the Tron look, but you have got to do something with the outlets and pipe for the electrical. They just clash with the room. An idea would be to 3d print some outlet covers, maybe use a combination of black filament and one that glows in the black light. You cover the pipes with more of the plastic you used to hold the lights. You could glue 3d print brackets inside the channels that use magnets to hold them to the pipes.
Couple of ideas for the window, put a window each side, but in the middle put a third piece that has pictures laser cut into it so the lights reflect off those pictures. Or some areas with horizontal lines and the code reads how far through a print is and the lights light up the horizontal lines to make it easier to see how close to finished the print jobs are while working on the outside.
I love it Bob, I'd like to see scrolling text on the window with various bits of information. e.g. Machine status, family schedule, ticker info (sports, financial), or any other types of notifications you have on your phone or watch. As for a name, I simply like - "The Lab"
For the indicator, you could easily assign certain section to relate to specific things inside the room, and each section could have a color that means something different. Could put text on the acrylic (in an on-theme way) that identifies each one.
The Lab.
Cool idea. Have the LED's change color depending on how far along a print is Red : Loss of Internet, Orange : Incomplete, Blue : Complete.
I like the movement on the ceiling. Would be cool if it continued down the wall to each piece of equipment. I like MurphySidekic's idea of having the window be a progress indicator for one or all of the printers in the room. Perhaps having light strips at each station that shows it's in operation with something that would indicate its progress in the window. Room name suggestion: The Codex
Well that's the coolest room in a shop I will ever probably see. Well done looks phenomenal!
Call it " THE ELEC-TRON-NIC ROOM "
Love it! Would maybe recommend a air purity sensor of some sorts, and have that reflect on to the window. I know when running my printers, the room can get warm, stuffy and probably a little toxic without air circulating and being filtered.
that being said, some sort of air filtration, a duct like a bathroom fan or something similar is something I would add into this room.
Good work, and inspiring as always!
c o o l b e a n s
The C.O.O.L. B.E.A.N.S. Room
For indicators you could get a frosted vinyl sticker and place them around the borders of the windows. Then selectively change those regions' colors based on what happening. For example printer 1 logo , green = running, red = error, blue = standby, green flash = print complete. Wifi logo in the upper corner. Would also be cool if you could put a spinning hologram display. On a wall or recessed in the window would be cool. Could be a clock, text notifications, sub count, etc
Use your laser to etch a design inside an acrylic tile. Mount the tile to cover a section of the lights. Program that section to change color when the thing happens. If your internet goes out, the internet tile will light glow red. Email, regular mail, unlimited options
A few ideas:
3D printer status indicators. You could cut some "frosted glass" vinyl into some representation of each printer and use the sidlit LEDs to change the color of those.
Doorbell Flashing
Decibel monitor for the woodshop
A slow moving dot in the LED strip could be enough to tell rough time, if it tracks like an hour hand.
Home assistant probably has the ability to integrate a lot of this.
Oh, and you should use the window to do "minority report" effects for your videos.. a bit more sci-fi just for fun.
The grid. You’re stepping into a place filled with technology. A little on the nose, yes, but you’ve already committed to Tron. You might as well commit 100%.
Window Idea - Use the UV markers to write a message on the window for a particular type of notification, e.g 'Printer Finished'.
Then use the LED's to emit UV/purple in certain sections that correspond to the physical location of the message so that only that message lights up.
Room Name Idea - Tron Lab?
Or, a room I've called elsewhere - Helix Lab.
Helix being an incline orbiting around a central plane.. As in the central plane is an idea, the helix are ideas, discussions, debates etc that revolve, evolve and move around that central thought/idea.
You can add small acrylic sheets with symbols, maybe print finished, print issue, filament empty, etc. you could etc the symbols onto little 2x2 acrylic squares, when the LEDs turn specific colors under them, they will glow or pulse indicating whatever status is lit up or pulsing. maybe line them up with each section of LED. the rest can pulse blue and white, and that section can pulse green or red or whatever, you could even potentially have a small servo slide the sheets off and on the LEDS so they aren't constantly being lit up
For the window, maybe put acrylic pieces, with a label on them that is edge lit by a specific group of LED's with a specific colour. These can be mounted around the window for various indicators.
You could turn the led around the window into a loading bar for 3D prints.
You could do that a couple different ways.
1.) when print is at 0% the light bar is off, but as it prints slowly more lights fill up around the window. 50% the light will only be on half the window. 100% the whole light bar is filled up.
2.) if you want to utilize the whole window during the entire charge you could designate a colour gradient to determine percentage. Red is 0%, green is 50% and blue is 100%. As it charges between each colour, it slowly mixes the colours so you’ll still have some fidelity of percentage. Or you could make it a more analogous colour scheme that starts at white and ends at red.
For the lights id say air quality but i think you already did that.
Without knowing how the room is for you its hard to know what would be good, but;
-temperature (doesn't look like you've got any aircon in there, i know its the basement but maybe it gets hot?)
-react to noise inside/outside the room. For this there are two uses, it could react to noise inside so it moves with music or perhaps even just the printer noises - could be cool. Or you point the mic outside and if someone calls you from outside the room it reacts to let you know.
-Days of the week - now this is more for how I work. So often I'll forget which day we're on. I've made myself a little desk clock and despite having the day written on there already I found it helped me to just add a little colour scheme for days (today is blue for the monday blues)
I could you see you incorporating more ideas from Tron for this room! Maybe the landscapes and shapes, or characters. Maybe call it the "Master Control Room".
When you open the door or start printing, have it where a smart speaker plays music from the soundtrack.
A great idea for the window light indicator would be to let you know when your printing jobs are done. Such an awesome room!
I feel that the window would work best as an indicator for a finished print with different colors or patterns for each seperateprinter. It would also be great to call the room "Tron 3D" or "ElectroLife"
Led indicator idea:
Workshop side:
1.~ tool battery charging station where chargers placed side by side on a shelf mounted below the lower window edge and indicate the charger status by same led width as the chargers are placed underneath...
2.0 ~ same principle but instead mounting the chargers top down on a shelf, making a charging station baseplate placing them in line from top to bottom and mounting the complete charging wall-board directly on the wall along one of the two vertical edges beside the window.
electronics room side:
2.1 ~ doing the same as described in point 2. But for electronic specific chargers (e.g. 18650...) along the oposite vertical edge as in point 2.
So by doing 2.0 & 2.1 you would always have an overview of the status of the batteries on the left and right led window edges, no matter which room you are in, and know immediately as soon as your tool battery is fully charged so that you can use it or swap it out to charge the second battery. The same applies to the electronics room charging station for 18650 or similar batteries.
Hope this could spray some inspiration ☺️🙏🏻 Keep thinkering✌🏻🤓
I think it could be useful to see a progression bar in the window depending on the percentage of completion for whatever 3D printer you’re utilizing at the moment!
print complete from printer 1 notification - one chasing pattern for a couple minutes.
print complete from printer 2 or laser or whatever, - different chase pattern for a couple minutes.
amazon delivery - pattern 3...
notification 4... pattern 4, etc.
If you can make the chase patterns work together and just build a longer "train" of specific light patterns or colors that chase around the window for a minute every 5-10 minutes until you clear the notifications.
Not sure what the notification management side looks like, but thats what id use the window for.
Kudos to intentional, purposeful rooms!
That room definitely feels like "Station".
Definitely needs to be called "The Grid", as many others have also mentioned already. Thanks for sharing the journey!
Idea: You can install a switch on your printers and add an end point in prints to tap the switch. Once the switch receives a value you can tell a portion of the windows leds to turn a specific color (maybe each printer gets its own color). Then you can assign a specific section to the printers and have different zones for other notifications.
Idea for window- find a projector or set one up to display information like time or words on a corner, and bonus for it to mirror its content for when you are out of the room, so it reads the right way. Might be difficult with the clear windows, but would be super cool!
Re the Window, indicating print progress or 3d print completion etc would be a good use for it. I like the fact that different colours can have different meanings.
For the window, give each 3d printer a color, and then use the strip around the windows as a loading / progress bar for how long a print has to complete. light up half way is 50% done and so-on.
then cycle the colors to show the status of each printer if there is more than one print going at a time
Two suggestions:
- you might want to look at old Tron video game arcade cabinets for inspiration to use partial reflections to get a transparent image. I think the technique is called "Pepper's Ghost". I seem to recall the arcade cabinets using that.
- some of the imagery of the Tron movies was the sense of vast empty spaces. Making some kind of parallax effect perhaps, or false perspective, might help to drive home the Tron feeling you're going for. Maybe make a false window opposite the real one, that looks out on an empty space?
If you ever remake the blacklight fixture, try using two concentric cylinders that rotate at different speeds and/or rotate the opposite direction. Also, it looks like the lightbulb might be directing a lot of light upwards. If your foil doesn't reflect that well, maybe put a 45 degree reflector above it and do something different with your cylinders at that level, leveraging the more concentrated light.
Something to display in the "window": dark blue with single light blue lights that "fall" on the edge -> when it is going to rain within the hour. If you have stuff outside, you know you need to put everything inside.
This is better then running trough the rain carrying heavy stuff. We've all been there...
Also a notification when it is getting too late. If you are like me, you forget time from time to time.
For the windows I think would be interesting to have another layer of acrylic that is like puzzle with etched icons that can be lighted up from the side. This means you would have low budget holographic display. You can have icon for each of your printers that is normally just dark, so it’s not that noticeable in the window, but lights orange for printing and green for done. It is a lot of work, but it might look super cool.
the window LEDs could make a sick progress bar, like yellow LEDs with a progressive bar of blue as prints are progressing, could even do specific sections of LEDs along the top of the window that flip from red to yellow to green for "there's a problem" "print is pending" "print is done" respectively
I would use the corners as indicators for each of the printers. Orange for Printing, Red for failed print, green for completed print and each printer would be the corners, but the entire strip could indicate the LARGE printer as well. That would be for 5 devices. You could add more to the program such as new devices, in the center portion of the straight runs as well.
As far as the window information goes, there is a device I use in my office called a Blink(1) , It is a usb controlled rgb led, and the program allows you to check for new messages online as well as color code them, so email, social media, and several other programmable checks, plus it is open source. I swapped the lone led for a strip, and have the strip running around my desk, so color coded notifications whenever I have messages. to do the multi layer window, I would separate the 3 color channels and give them each a lone track in the window. so the track you have now for full rgb control, then a red, blue, and green stand alone track. that would let you etch an individual piece of acrylic with whatever pattern you want, and light up just that panel when you have the designated notification come through.
in the window you should overlay separate pieces of acrylic in funky shapes, one for each device in the room. you can puzzle them into the window and have led indicators show print progress or flash error codes such as filament out.
If it were my room, I'd call it the Bacta Tank or BacTa. Clean room, construction/reconstruction area. Plus the view from the woodworking area into the window makes it really look like a bacta tank. Star Wars reference for a Tron room, I know but it's a win for all of us geeks.
One funny but fitting reference to name the room could be the 'Light Tank'. I thought it was funny cuz it could refer to how it's enclosed and like a fish tank, but also because there is light streaming all throughout it making it a full blown Tron tank.
since its running on an ESP one idea is to pivot to running EPSHome on the controller and stand up a Home Assistant server. Its a bit of work to get going but then the sky is the limit for connectivity. For instance there is an Octoprint component that would talk to the 3D printers. Awesome Project!
Idea: use the strip in the window as a status bar for your 3D prints. Change the color along the strip at the progress changes. Like the advertisement countdowns in your own videos.
You can use the old ESP and run WLED on it. Connect it to your home automation environment such as home assistant and now you can use the lights not only for internet outage, but also other status indication.