Yup, Errol had lights before, but now...
Previously I wrote about using LED strips and I finally had a chance to try it. I used those Neopixel ones at 140+ LEDs per metre. (That's >700 LEDs for Errol's wings) I glued them along the side of plexiglass wing ribs and ground the other edge to a bevel so the light gets prismed off the edge. The effect is startling- the colours just transition along the entire wing rib and can strobe to a blinding level. Definitely something to try... (but, yeah, these wings are a little sturdier than my previous ones and I accidentally clobber someone every so often- embarrassing)
Anyway. The tech; that's something else. If any of you are going to try this, maybe my little journal entry here will help.
Of course, I immediately ran out of memory on the computer board I used (that Arduino YUN I have for the ESP section). It's fine without the 'Bridge' library, but I wanted that for the webserver. So, I'm still trying to come up with a way to rewrite that "Adafruit' library most people use for these strips (maybe you don't need 3 bytes of RAM per pixel). For now, the LEDs are limited to 260 per wing.
Also, these lights can use up to 3 amperes per wing so I quickly ran out of power. The voltage drop from the battery through the connectors and along the retractable cables to the wings was over 3 volts sometimes- enough so my batteries (which are 7 volts for the servos) didn't supply a high enough voltage. The computer would crash and the light show (though spectacular) wasn't what I planned.
So now I use a 12 volt battery and each part has a separate regulator to supply the 5 volts everything needs. (And these are 10 amp regulators) A pair of 3300 AH LiPOs seem to be doing the job.
One great thing of the Arduino are some nice demo programs for sound processing. Together with a microphone kit from Adafruit, my previous efforts at working with sound detection are terrible in comparison. WOW, this thing works well! I've fooled with the software a bit to make different display modes from spectrum to scrolling to strobe...
And now with that YUN board, it serves up a webpage with REST calls to the Arduino .ino sketch- you can do almost anything with the LEDs. How cool is that? 'Course, I'm still learning how to do this stuff too...