An Arduino sketch that blinks 12 V RGB LED strips according to a DNA
sequence. Its purpose is to provide an extra dimension to Christmas, and other
decorative, LED ligthing. Therefore, the sktech is preloaded with a
gene sequence from Norway Spruce, Picea abies, so that you can put up
a truly meta Christmas tree. Or, you can make a Christmas tree shape
from LEDs and have yourself a minimalist abstract Christmas.
By default the color mappings are:
- A -> red
- T -> Purple (red+blue)
- C -> blue
- G -> green
A YouTube video of it in action.
The code was developed for 12 V LED strips with separate R, G, B LEDs, but it should work just as fine with combined RGB LED strips (or single LEDs), as long as you do the wiring properly. If you run a true RGB LED strip, where all the LEDs are combined under one lens, it is possible to get better transitions and more colors with very little code tweaking. The information on how the code works is contained in the code comments, so be sure to check those out in the Nucleotide-Control-RGB-LEDs.ino file.
Schematic wiring diagrams for the driving circuit are available in the repository in both .fzz and .PDF formats, with file names 'Nucleotide-Control-RGB-LEDs.fzz', and 'Nucleotide-Control-RGB-LEDs.PDF', respectively. The .fzz file can be opened in Fritzling
##List of components
- 1 x Arduino Pro Nano clone (16 MHz Atmega328P)
- 3 x 5 m common cathode 12 V RGB LED strips
- 3 x 8.2 kOhm resistors
- 3 x TIP120 darlington transistors
- 1 x LM2040CT-5.0 5V Voltage regulator (a 7805 will work fine too)
- 1 x 1 uF 50 V capacitor
- 1 x 22 uF 50 V capacitor
- 1 x Nintendo GameCube 12 V power brick
- some differently colored wires (helps with keeping track on which channel is which)
- 3 x Old lab glass bottles for presentation (optional)
##To Do's before next holiday season
-
Real-time access to send GenBank accession numbers, so everyone can see their favourite gene, or genome, in action.
-
A bioPhyton parser to quickly make .ido-friendly nucleotide sequence strings. It will be just like FASTA, but with double quotes (") around each line.
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Probably Raspberry Pi integration.
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Analogue knobs to change the variables controlling LED behaviour, such as gradient, speed, max_intensity et.c.
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A fouth "dimension" of some sort to signal if the current nucleotide is exon or intron (coding, or non coding).
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If I get a proper RGB strip I'll move on to amino acid (protein) sequences and more colors.
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