This project consists of two pieces of firmware. One for the LED-driving chip, and one for the Mobius coil driving chip. Instructions on how to physically build the pyramid will be available soon.
The LED-driving firmware is build for the atmega328p chip. The coil-driving firmware will be build for the attiny2313, and in the future possibly a smaller chip.
In order to build these firmwares, you need avr-gcc, avrdude and Python 3 installed.
Otherwise, make is obviously required.
Python is required because it generates some C code that defines the random field.
To build the LED-driving chip's firmware, go into folder led-driver, and run make.
To flash the firmware on to the chip, the fuses need to be set once with make setfuses, and then the firmware can be flashed with make flash.
Both generally need administrator level access.
However, because everyone has a different programmer, you need to set the variable PROGRAMMER_ID in the makefile.
Also, if you programmer is not at /dev/ttyUSB0, you need to set DEV_PATH also.
An example of building and flashing the LED-driving chip with and stk500 programmer that is accessible on /dev/ttyUSB1:
make
sudo make setfuses PROGRAMMER_ID=stk500v2 DEV_PATH=/dev/ttyUSB1
sudo make flash PROGRAMMER_ID=stk500v2 DEV_PATH=/dev/ttyUSB1
The LED driver make use of a (semi-)random field that got precompiled into the chip. It uses this 'random field' to generate a semi-random map of colors that it will 'move over'. That is how it decides the colors to use for the LED's at a particular time.
Running make bitmap in led-driver, will compile the C code with gcc into a binary that produces a bitmap file, and then runs it.
The bitmap will be placed in led-driver/bin/random_field.bmp.
The bitmap is smaller than the field that is actually used, because otherwise the resolution would be too big.