Arduino Controlled LED Staff

I imagine it must have been a Thursday, somewhere around 9:45 and Esplanade, when my good friend Metaphorge noticed among the throngs of deviants and devil worshipers, a pixie of a girl spinning the k8 led staff. In an alkali haze I promised him one for his birthday, and promptly forgot. Facebook reminded me with a whopping 4 days to spare, and I realized that these things couldn't be that hard to build (certainly not $2-300 hard to build).

I got on the fantastic Jameco Website to order a 6ft RGB LED strip ($40) and some PN2222 transistors ($5) to sink each channel of the strip (1a / rgb = ~333ma per color, right? Two fried transistors and an arduino uno that lost its tx/rx channels later...), and threw it in a 1.5" polycarb tube ($30) from Tap Plastics. I assembled it with a USnooBie ($20) acquired at midnight from David Rorex's personal stash at Ace Monster Toys. Here's the resulting ~$100 prototype Arduino Controlled LED Staff during a recent Make: Live broadcast:

Turns out prototypes are awesome. It forced me to solve problems I hadn't even thought about, like power management and how to actually get everything into the tube. For the first problem, I'm working on a 5->12v boosting power supply based on the MAX1771 so I can drive a full 12v@1a strip from four rechargeable AA batteries, rather than the 8 Alkalines I have in there now.

The second problem, fitting the LEDs and electronics in the tube, is even more complicated now that I'm moving from 1.5" polycarb (1.25" inner diameter, plenty for 2 AA batteries side by side, USnooBies, and perfboard power supplies) to a 1" polycarb tube with only 0.75" inner diameter, barely larger than a single AA battery. This makes battery minimization even more important, as I'm going to have to come up with some solution to light up the 120mm or so on each end of the staff that's filled with batteries. I'm considering rechargable AAAs, but that's going to mean less than half the spin time considering the massive (~3a) draw with the boosting power supply.

Adding to that the requirement of a microusb port, better control switches, and waterproofing (or at least rain/dewproofing), and it's starting to feel like a real product rather than just a quick hack.

The most common question I get, considering I'm surrounded by hackers is whether each LED is addressable. The answer's "nope, but I'm working on it." I'm probably going to buy a bunch of WS2801 LED drivers from Sparkfun, but I'm looking for alternatives.