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bebezeled

An art project I made to be shown at work, specifically at my cubicle. I have some bezels from various storage appliances, and since some of them either have light pipes for status LEDs, or embedded LEDs, I figured I'd make them and the desktop rack do something other than collect dust.


Checking my soldering handiwork on the i2c seven segment backpack board and my shitty Micropython skills.
With the BEEP comes the BOOP. At one point I had a loop changing between the two.
The Finished project. the picture doesnt show it, but the status LEDs cycle color, and also change brightness at random. the LED display has a single segment that chases itself in an infinity loop across both digits.
The bezel that started the project- a Pure Storage bezel. I made the rack mounts, and a secondary board that uses the factory Molex connector so that the bezel does not have to be modified at all. the LEDs are WS2812-compatible.
THis trainwreck of a mess is the guts of the project, and theres a day or two worth of 3d printing, several days worth of modeling in TInkerCAD, and a couple days of programming the Adafruit RP2040 "Scorpio" feather to do my bidding across both the LED output channel and the i2c bus. The breadboarded LEDs got installed in a 3d printed puck that is strapped to the backsize of the bottom Netapp bezel.
The Netapp appliance uses a specific style and size of LED seven segment module that was tricky to find - the i2c backpack I used for this project is expecting both a 4 digit display, and a larger module, so getting the segments wired correctly was a bit tricky.
I actually have a second set of these, because idiot me ordered the common anode version of the part instead of the common cathode version. While both part houses I use (Digikey and Mouser) have both part numbers, one had the CA version, and the other had the CC version, but not both. :(
Building the Pure bracket was interesting, and if I needed to do it over again, Id do it differently. the molex connector is attached to the chunk of protoboard, and since it requires 12 volts, it also acts as the power ingress for the entire project. the LEDs and Scorpio board are driven off a 12 volt to 5 volt adapter (the blue thing next to the black connector to the right of the printed parts), and the bezel plugs in to the molex connector. (that was also a difficult part to source, because Molex has a hojillion different part numbers for a 2x2 connector.)
I did eventually find the right connector part number, got a couple ordered, and Viola! it works!
A size comparison: the i2c backback, its mating 4 digit LED display, and the tiny led module the Netapp disk shelves use.
  
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