I am interested in looking into making our robot have some better curb appeal for next year and after seeing some great lighting on robots this year was wondering how people have done theirs. If we do decide to put lights on the robot next year they will probably be controlled with an arduino uno or Mega depending upon the amount of lights we use and would communicate between it and the Crio via I2C. My question here is how would I program this in both Java (for the Crio) and using the Arduino sketchbook (for the arduino)?
Also what lights are most recommended for use on a robot. I would like them to be fairly bright but not overly expensive (we are on a budget). I don't believe we would need individually addressable LEDs on the strip however would like RGB to give us some variety.
Finally after seeing bots such as 118 I am curious as to how teams achieve a look where it appears all of the light from the LEDs is even all throughout the lit areas as can be seen
here. The only way I can think of achieving this is by placing smoked poly-carbonate in front of the LEDs. Any and all help/suggestions are greatly appreciated.