Wave JT – LED chaser with Joule Thief
Wave JT is a multi-function LED chaser/scanner/sequencer. Wave JT incorporates Joule Thief to power the LEDs, so it operates on just a single AA battery.
Wave JT has over 16 sequence patterns, and speed can be adjusted by double/triple tapping the button. It’s the most compact yet versatile LED chaser.
Sequence patterns include many variation of the classic “Larson Scanner” from “Knight Rider”, random sparks, fade in/out, flashing, etc.
Even though there is only one button switch on Wave JT, you can control many things with it.
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Hi what do you use to program the pic 16F1823, As i want to change the sequence, Thanks John
April 6, 2014 at 10:55 am
I use PICKit 3. You can find the details here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Wave-JT/
April 6, 2014 at 11:50 am
Hello LED Artist.
Thanks for such a fun site with awesome LED goodies. I had received a Wave JT for a project I’m working on, after a few days this idea came to me as to what to do with this neat item. I hope you enjoy as much as my daughter and myself do. I present the first and only Altoids Tin/ave JT personalized handheld nightlight/flashlight. YouTube video link below :)
http://youtu.be/6Oc4vtjSwQ4
July 4, 2013 at 8:57 pm
hallo again sir.
thanks for your answer. i have now progam the chip and get it working. took some hours to fix and understand the PIC2 uppgrade. nice. i tried to skip the joule thief and connect it directly to 5 volt vith a switch connected to 5 v also. it starts with one led at the time and when switch is pushed pmw secuence starts for one turn then its dead until i reset power. must pin 2 have some clockfrequency? i like this ide and chip becouse its 1/4 in price compered with other chip and your sequencing is very nice. is it possible to run directry from 5 volt without joule thief?
best regards
Backe, Sweden
October 7, 2012 at 3:52 am
If you want to skip the voltage booster and supply 5V directory, connect the power supply to the IC pin 1 rather than pin 2. Pin 2 controls the booster circuit and also checks the button switch.
You can use the #2 and #3 holes of the ICSP header which you can access from the back side of the PCB. The hole with the triangle pointing is the #1. #2 hole is for +5V, and the #3 is GND/Earth.
Aki
October 7, 2012 at 7:59 pm
hallo sir
how do i program PIC16F1824 with a pickit2.
it says no supported device.
best regards, Backe, Sweden
October 5, 2012 at 11:40 am
You need PICKit 2 ver.2.61 (or later) software – download from Microchip.com and install. (http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/PICkit%202%20v2.61.00%20Setup%20A.zip)
Then choose “Midrange/1.8V” from “Device Family” menu. Then you will find “PIC16F1824″ in the “Device” selection.
Aki
October 5, 2012 at 12:16 pm
The colors on the LED are incredible!
August 22, 2012 at 5:22 pm
Yeah, seeing your Wave JT made me consider getting out Eagle and seeing if I could arrange 6 RGB LEDs on a reasonably-sized board since I have a couple dozen RGB LEDs going spare. But I’m still debugging the current setup – if I try to put in too many modes (like 3 or 4 versus the current 2) into my main function switch, it gets visibly jerky. I haven’t imported it into AVR Studio to see what the compiler is doing to it, though. But that’s on the internal 8MHz RC clock. If I upgraded to the 20 pin tiny2313 and clocked it at 20MHz, I suspect a lot of the quirkiness would go away.
But there’s something intrinsically fun about a design that simply uses a microcontroller, some resistors and 4 LEDs to make glowing shinies. Overcomplicate it too much and some of the appeal is lost.
And with 9 pins, you could drive 9*8=72/3=24 RGB LEDs if you ran them in a charlieplex. Common anode or common cathode, either one works, I’m using both. The pin to LED LUT I use is different of course, but the electrical characteristics are similar enough. But 24 LEDs would be more than enough for a chaser! You could get away with 6 pins driving 8 RGB LEDs (leaving 6 “LEDs” unfilled) and freeing up a pin or two for the mode switch. I just don’t know how much the altered duty cycle would affect your response curves. Might be a fun experiment. Of course, I say this with a variety of AVR charlieplex toolkits under my belt, I don’t know what the PIC environment looks like.
August 6, 2012 at 12:48 am
Maybe this is a dumb question but what did you use to program the PIC?
August 3, 2012 at 3:57 pm
I used PICKit 2 and 3. I tried them both just because I had them both… You can use either one, or ICD 2, 3, etc.
Aki
August 3, 2012 at 3:59 pm
Just because I don’t think I’ve ever seen the full description – how do you regulate the joule thief’s output into something that a microcontroller is happy about? I have a nice attiny-driven 4 RGB LED charlieplex arrangement that I’d love to run from a joule thief since it already gets ~13-14 hours from a CR2016, but the notion of feeding the unfiltered transients from a JT into a poor unsuspecting microcontroller gives me the heebie jeebies.
(Also: Totally jealous of your RGB camerawork. Every last video I’ve ever shot of mine has been utterly blown out unless I adjust their maximum brightnesses in the code, and then the colors go all wonky…)
August 2, 2012 at 1:59 am
Ah, found the instructable link with schematic and the question is answered.
August 2, 2012 at 2:03 am
Hello Patrick,
Glad you found the instructables. I should post more info here nowadays…
BTW I’d love to see whatever you are working on. Send me pics or links please.
Aki
August 2, 2012 at 10:12 am
Glad I subscribed to you. VERY nice products. My Compliments.!!
July 30, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Why not with rgb leds, like the aurora ?
July 29, 2012 at 4:24 pm
With the 14 pin PIC, I can only control 3 RGB LEDs. That wouldn’t be much fun…
July 30, 2012 at 12:35 am
assuming you have 9 outputs… you can multiplex 6 RGB LEDs with that, or charlieplex 24 RGB LEDs.
August 3, 2012 at 1:12 am
Yes with 9 output pins, you can drive up to 72 LEDs via Charlieplexing. However I wanted the LEDs to be able to fade nicely so I used my unique PWM method. Which eliminates the possibilities of Charlieplexing. Also, RGB LEDs are often 4 pin devices with either anodes or cathodes connected together, which eliminates the use of Charlieplexing as well.
August 3, 2012 at 1:18 am
Ah, that’s not _entirely_ true – http://aglick.com/charliecube.html is using charlieplexing to drive 64 RGB LEDs, but his software API only drives them at 100% per channel, so you only get the 7 primaries (red, green, blue, yellow, teal, purple, white). I already had been using a non interrupt driven softPWM in other similar small projects, so I decided to try it out in RGB space. Right now I think it works out to something like 6 bits per color, after all the scaling and optimizations.
Anyway, here’s a youtube of one of my more recent development videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4m_K51Ci8 – although that might be running off of the arduino development board. I know this one is off of the ATtiny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nesiki5XKm4
August 5, 2012 at 11:10 pm
You got me thinking… Yes I _can_ drive 6 RGB common anode/cathode LEDs with 9 pins.
I don’t know – are 6 LEDs enough for a chaser?
Aki
August 5, 2012 at 11:25 pm
P.S. I watched the videos. Very nice.
BTW I’m doing software PWM in 8 bit resolution. I believe that can be done with AVR as well. The clock has to be 20 MHz to run the PWM fast enough though.
August 5, 2012 at 11:31 pm