Rainbowduinos make nice cat eyes

youtube.com/watch?v=rJSrwx3Axdc

This is a cat lantern we made for a lantern parade. Its eyes are two Rainbowduinos. The animation was done with a GIF animator and converted with rainbowconverter. Frames were stored on a Seeeduino Mega and sent over I2C to the Rainbowduino boards, which were running the neorainbowduino firmware.

The brightness of the white LEDs has been toned down a lot so that the eyes would come out on video, in the parade it was lit up much brighter than this. The white LEDs were driven from the Mega’s digital pins via a ULN2803 driver.

The lantern got a bit battered around, the eyes were originally lined up with the lantern a lot better. I originally wanted to do a lot more animation but making the lantern took so long (we suck at crafts!) that there was only a couple of hours left before the parade, so we ended up with the minimal (but cute, I think) effort you see here.