Justin Liu - Enron

BACKGROUND

I was brought onto the Enron Raptor team on the UT Austin Theatre department to lead the electronics team. Our task was to provide lighting for multiple raptor suits and communicate with them wirelessly. The designer wanted thin blue outlines, red pulsing blood, and glowing eyes. The implementation we decided on was electroluminscient wiring for the outline, addressable LED strips for the blood, and standard LEDs for the eyes. The wireless communication to and from the Arudino would be done by XBEE. I just finished my first word clock, and was excited to jump into a new electrical engineering project.

Raptor eyes designed and milled. This was pretty simple, and lead me to redesign my word clock later on.

The Arduino stack has the following: the base Arduino controls the DC signals to the eyes and the addressable LED strips. The middle layer sends AC power signals to the AC power supply in order to activate the electroluminscient wires. The top layer holds the XBEE for wireless communication. Running the blood pulse signal through separate strands of addressable LEDs caused random LEDs to flicker. After experimenting, we found that the different lengths of addressable LEDs were causing the glitch, which was quickly fixed with a code change.

Electroluminscient wire lighting up wirelessly via XBEE wireless communication, after days of frustrating setbacks. Using XCTU on laptop to send commands to the Arduino with XBEE shield.

All three light sources working in the dark, for all the raptors.

ENRON RAPTORS

BACKGROUND