Alklima Provada LED table hardware documentation

Concept

Alklima is a reseller of Mitsubishi climate installations. The company builds installations that are fully electric and wanted to promote this on a convention. I got the job of building an installation that lights op a scale model of a city with led-strips. The table concists of 4 sectors: retail, living, working and hotels. On the led panel these 4 sectors are represented with a symbol and will light up when a sector is fully lit.

Hardware

The circuit that lights up the led table looks like this:

Power comes from the wall outlet and gets transformed to 5 volts, and gets regulated by a condensator for safety. The power and ground get split in a circuit board into 4 usb port, one for each sector. One extra ground is connected to ground the arduino. The data from the arduino goes through the circuit board to the sectors to light up the ledstrips in a specific order. The ledstrips get interjected by a simple wire that connects the buildings. The circuit is direct from building to building and parallel in the buildings themselves.

The circuit of the backpanel looks like this:

The arduino from the led table sends serial data to another arduino to light up a part of the panel when the corresponding panel is lit up.

Software

The arduino software is writen in C++ using a custom library. The major challange here was running asynchronous functions since the arduino is not built for this, with the freeRTOS library i was able to get this to work: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/feilipu/using-freertos-multi-tasking-in-arduino-ebc3cc.