AutoX Systems (Project Escalade)

[AutoXSystems]

Hello All,

  I just wanted to share with everyone the latest and greatest of my projects. This little RC has given me plenty of attention at car shows and at local parties!

It is my Toy Cadilac Escalade!




I purchased the Toy at Wal-Mart For about $70 and retro-fitted one of my custom LED Under Car Kits to it! I make the Kits from scratch so I was able to fabricate a very precise tubing set for this project.

Here are a few more pic's for your enjoyment!













The LED tubes on the Escalade are 2 x 10" and 2 x 14". Each tube has 1" solid filled endcaps with make the tubes completely waterproof. That gives you 8" of light propegating from the front/rear and 12" of light on the sides. The tubes are incased in 1/8 wall 1"dia polycarbonate tubing. Which basicly means these tube will most likely out last the toy. They are almost litterly indistructable! I have went as far as hitting them on rail road ties to try and break the tubes. I even ran a set over with a car and still no damage.. Anyways more about the tubes.

The LED array I use us consisted of 24 LED's per foot. Thats 1 LED every 1/2". The LED's are arranged in R,G,B,R,G,B,etc... Order. As you can see and will see in the videos having the Same color LED's 1 1/2" apart and no more then 1 1/2" from the surface 60-Degree LED's suffice just fine.

I am using Ultra High Quality 60-Degree LED's. Red 625nm, Green 525nm and Blue 470nm. For people that don't know much about LED's and LED coloring.. these exact wavelength of LED's is critical if you plan to product the entire spectrum. If just one of the LED's is a little out of its range the color will be a wash from what you would normally expect from it performance!

I use Programmable PIC running a highly sofisticated PWM Software Routine which gives me 128 levels of brightness per LED. Thats a total of more then 2 million colors any 1 pixel 1R,1G,1B can produce. I could have went with 256 steps but the difference is barely noticable.

I made everything from scratch.

The Controller is also a programmable PIC and it also supports USB input. I use this to upload my patterns to it. I also have connected to the controller a 4 button wireless remote. This allows me to change my patterns at any given time.

The Escalade is still completely functional! even the boom-boc in the back still works!

Here are a few videos of my Toy in action.



All of the following links are AVI's! They don't Stream so if it seams like it is taking forever for it to load it's because AVI's do not stream.
To see a download progress Right click on the link and select "Save Target As" this will allow you to view the size of the file and its download progress!



http://www.autoxsystems.com/globalvids/EscaladeV1.avi

http://www.autoxsystems.com/globalvids/EscaladeV2.avi

http://www.autoxsystems.com/globalvids/EscaladeV3.avi

http://www.autoxsystems.com/globalvids/EscaladeV4.avi

http://www.autoxsystems.com/globalvids/EscaladeV5.avi

http://www.autoxsystems.com/globalvids/EscaladeV6.avi

http://www.autoxsystems.com/globalvids/EscaladeV7.avi






I have a website that has more pictures and videos of my little toy and other digital Lighting Projects. If you light LED's you should check out my Web Page!
www.autoxsystems.com

Hope you all have enjoyed my "Project Escalade"

Any one else ever seen anything like this before?


Best Regards,
   Dale Schroeder

[justDIY]

Dale,

I just dl'd your videos

that is some pretty awesome stuff you have going on there!

not sure about the different effects, but I have seen the RGB led light bars before at a Best Buy outside Miami, FL ... I can't find mention of them on the bb website, it may have been some sort of local promotion ... they were setup inside the amp and subwoofer kiosk (in the auto sound dept) ... the interface was a single knob that turned 360 and also clicked in (down) to change mode/effect/color/speed/etc

the bar was in a clear plastic tube, with 5mm t1 3/4 discrete leds arranged in rows along with a lot of different surface mount components that I couldn't get a close look at (the bar was well protected)

ahh ... here is something similar (not sure this is what I saw or not... google is turning up a lot of different ones, all very similar)

http://www.oznium.com/ufo

[AutoXSystems]

Ahh yes,

  Best Buy does not make anything like these tubes. The company that supplies best buy is called "Color Morfix". the tubes that they make are 10" long and can only do 1 solid color. not have multi colors in 1 tube. With a price tag some were around $65.00 for 10" its a rip off! it took my friend more them $1600 to "Light Up" his car and was very displeased. Plus the remote doesn't work like it is supposed to. Very Slow systems.

  As for the UFO web site. That company is my only competitor. I found Ice Led about 2 years ago and was so impressed that I started to manufacture my own undercar kits. His projects inspired me!
 
  My Design is very different from his design. In both of our 1 foot tubes we will compare. He has 16 Opticaly Matched LED's where I have 24. His tube can only display 3 different colors per foot where I can display 8 per foot. That's a different color every 1.5". We both run on a High Speed Serial Connection. Like I said. I like his kits so much I started to manufacture my own. My tubes are much cheaper as well but I will not discuss that here.

  OK enough bashing. Basicly my High Resolution kit allowed me produce the same effect no matter if it was on a toy or a real car.  All made from scratch.

I hope to have more pictures and video on my website and this forum so people can see how the tubes work and how they are Assembled.

Thanks for looking at my project

Dale