ELI-NP laser miniature

This was one Prototyping project developed for FabLab, a production workshop in Bucharest. FabLab had at that time under development a miniature of the ELI-NP (Extreme Light Infrastructure – Nuclear Physics) research institute from Magurele, Romania. As you can see in Figure 1, this miniature had more than 20 meters of LED strip replicating the laser beams from the laboratories which had to be lit in a precise manner to replicate the real behavior of the lasers. In this project, my contribution was only to develop the embedded software for the two microcontrollers controlling the LED strips.

As seen in Figures 2 to 5 the laser beams were replicated using addressable LED strips masked under an opaque plastic shield. As this may sound easy to do, if you add a tight deadline of less than a week to assemble the LED strip and write the embedded C code, the application gets more complicated.  Furthermore, it had to light in a precise manner every LED strip to give the user an overview of the real laser beam formation process (e.g. in Figure 2 as the red beam advanced, the small green ones had to light sequentially as if they were feeding the larger red one with energy).

With some late-night work with the incredible team from Fablab I successfully finished the assembling and programming for all the LED strips involved in this project. The miniature even left the country to represent Romania at the EXPO 2017 ASTANA. This was an intense software project which along with e-mailbox or mind battle helped me develop extreme caution to error-handling routines when developing embedded applications working without human intervention.