LED microcontroller

A hardware project I built to learn by doing: LED lighting that reacts to music, designed from the board up rather than assembled from a kit.

I built the whole signal path myself:

• a custom ATmega32 board doing the driving and timing
• analog amplification for the incoming audio, fed through an ADC so the microcontroller could actually read the waveform
• the logic to turn that signal into light moving in time with the sound

Most of what I understand about the firmware/electronics boundary I picked up on projects like this one — a soldering iron, a datasheet, and a circuit that does nothing until, suddenly, it does. I later built a wireless companion to it, controlling the strips over RF instead of a wire.

Final product