Fibonacci spiral LED sousaphone bell

[jbaylies]

Hi all,

I recently got my LED sousaphone bell up and running. You can check out a video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur06SqJT4qg

I'm looking forward to taking it to the streets once I can figure out how to fit my portable battery pack and laptop in my backpack without them overheating.

I put together a tutorial on how to build this yourself here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18ca ... sp=sharing All the info is there, but I still need to clean it up a lot.

[jbaylies]

I think you told me that the one that I sent to you - a really early-vintage model 22K Conn bell (I had painted black for you) that was actually made of fiberglass instead of plastic - had (sadly) picked up a crack in shipment. It looks like you got what you want. If you haven’t sold the other one, I could try to find you a buyer, unless you are keeping it as a spare. Just let me know.

It had developed a small crack in shipment, but it was easy to glue together and spray some more paint on it. I'm definitely gonna keep the other one so I can choose if I want to gig with or without the LEDs while playing the same horn. That 22K is my main horn now! My 40K is for sale at Dillon Music. https://www.dillonmusic.com/used-conn-4 ... sn-281120/ My back just couldn't take three gigs in a row with that thing.

[TheodoreSmith]

Hey you should try a raspberry pi zero, it's a $5 mini computer and super easy to setup.

[jbaylies]

Hey you should try a raspberry pi zero, it's a $5 mini computer and super easy to setup.

I was considering that, but I think I'm gonna jump right to a STM32 https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers- ... -mcus.html" target="_blank

I've been told that the raspberry pi is for prototyping, while the STM32 is for products. Seems that a lot of people would rather purchase it as a bell cover instead of a permanent installation on the bell. Not sure how low I could get the price, though, considering how tedious it is to solder 600 little wires onto 200 LEDs.

Forster Rohner is the only company I've found that could mass produce washable LED bell covers, but they told me that they don’t have the capacity to deal with high development effort for very small batches in a niche sector. http://www.frti.ch/en/" target="_blank