Thoughtophone

A few weeks ago, I thought it would be fun to make some fairy wings as a Halloween costume for Sarita. Of course, they needed to glow :). I've finished adding to optical fibre and LEDs to one of the wings. Here it is showing off a cycling rainbow: It uses one of these neopixel strips , which I'm controlling with an Arduino mini. That's so I only need a single 5V supply. I thought about an ESP8266 - some sort of remote control would be neat, but this project has already proved sufficiently complicated. I've coupled the fibres by making an acetal block with 4mm holes to match the spacing of the leds. In this picture it's just held in place with cable ties, but that seems to work OK. The fibres are 2mm side glowing, and there are 2 per LED. I bought 10m which is going to be just enough. Now I just have to make the other wing, and figure out how to make it wearable before next weekend. Not sure I'll manage that, but at least I made this video.

I've mentioned I'm not that impressed by NodeMCU. Part of the problem is the underlying ESP8266 firmware. Why can't I have a simple send frame method and pick my own IP stack? I also can't really be bothered with another tool chain: I have arm-none-eabi already. I also want enough peripherals not to need another micro controller. The EMW3165 is billed by hackaday as an ESP8266 killer . It seems to tick all the boxes above: I already use the STM32F411 it's based on. I've got a couple of modules to play with, most people are using st-link to upload firmware, and the wifi runs on a separate Broadcom chip which you communicate with via SDIO: it can't be that hard to get up and running. There's very little by way of structured documentation though: I want to know the SDIO wire protocol for communicating with the WiFi chip. No luck yet. Actually I think this is pretty much a dead end: You need to accept a Broadcom license to get WICED and there's