Retroball or Super Pong Table Grows Up

September 19, 2012 By 8 Comments

pong-table

Retroball is, as its Kickstarter campaign says, “Retro Fun for up to Four Players.” What you might not know, is that it’s ancestor was featured here earlier last year. With a year and a half of development underway, the build looks spectacular, and the people in their promo video look like they’re having lots of fun (obviously).

The whole concept of the game is that it has up to four players that each manipulate a paddle as in the classic Pong game. The obvious difference is that there are four players, and everything is played on a 32 x 32 LED array.

Although it looks like fun in it’s stock form, readers of Hack a Day will most likely start thinking about how they could modify it for their own uses. Everything is open source, and they promise to release the documentation for this project. On the other hand, if you can’t wait, or would rather build something very similar, check out [Brad]‘s original Instructable article!

Filed Under: toy hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Tuitwall uses PHP-fed Arduino to display tweets

September 18, 2012 By 4 Comments

[Santiago] recently completed this project which he calls Tuitwall. It will display your Twitter feed on an LED matrix. The method he used to put it together will come in handy for any project where you need to scrape information from the Internet.

The project does require a server in addition to the Arduino hardware seen above. On the Arduino side [Santiago] uses an Ethernet shield and an LED matrix which is addressed via SPI. The server is running a PHP script which takes advantage of the twitteroauth library to handle authentication.

There’s a little bit of configuration to be done, most of it having to do with how Twitter handles 3rd party applications. But once everything is set up you can take the hardware with you and plug it into any network (as long as it offers DHCP). With this framework as a guide it’s a snap to bend it to your will. It could be used as an RSS reader, time and temperature, server farm status, a prank ticket displaying fake headlines, etc.

Filed Under: Arduino Hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Hacking the Peggy

September 13, 2012 By 6 Comments

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories received an email from someone who wanted to hack their Peggy kit. This LED matrix kit has been featured on Hack a Day in the past, and provides hardware to set up a 625 LED matrix.

This user built an external array of LEDs that they wanted to drive with the Peggy hardware. There are a few options for making this happen. The first one is to run wires from each of the 625 LED footprints on the board. Each has an anode and cathode, so that makes for a total of 1250 wires to run. It turns out that people have actually done this with the Peggy in the past, using very fine wire.

EMSL suggests wiring the rows and columns instead. This way, only one wire is needed for each row and column, allowing a 25×25 LED grid to use 50 wires instead of 1250. They also explain how to expand the grid to a 30×20 LED matrix. It’s a good explanation of how the kit works, and how it can be expanded.

Photo [oskay]

Filed Under: led hacks Tagged With: , ,

Writing on LEDs with a laser pointer

July 27, 2012 By 13 Comments

After [Ch00f] got his hands on an 8×8 LED display, he didn’t make a 64-pixel video game or VU meter. He made a laser doodler, allowing him to draw on this display with only a laser pointer.

Using LEDs as light sensors is nothing new; [Forrest Mims III] discovered that LEDs can also detect light way back in the late 60s. [Ch00f] played around with this concept before creating a circuit that uses an LED as both a light emitter and sensor that reacts to the ambient brightness.

[Ch00f]‘s laser doodler takes this phenomena and applies it to an Adafruit bicolor LED matrix. When a light shines on an individual pixel in the display, the ATMega48 senses the current and turns that pixel on. Since this these pixels have two colors, [Ch00f] used a latch circuit and a button to cycle between what color the ‘Mega writes to the display.

In the video after the break, [Ch00f] shows off his display by having the LEDs light up in response to a laser pointer. It may be a bit small, but we can see a lot of potential for something like this as a gigantic art installation.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: led hacks Tagged With: , , ,

LED matrix shield starts with a very loud snap

May 2, 2012 By 3 Comments

We see a lot of LED matrix projects. They’re fun, and you can learn a lot of basic lessons during the build. But this one is out of the ordinary. [Rtty21] built an oddly sized, and sound controlled matrix shield for his Arduino. That’s it right there, the shield is the large chunk of protoboard but you can just see the Arduino peeking up over the top of it.

Now we say oddly sized because a 9×9 matrix doesn’t make much sense with an 8-bit micro controller. There’s no schematic but in the clip after the break he mentions that the columns and rows are driven by a decade counter and shift register and that’s what makes it possible to drive nine bits easily. Also of note on the board is that washer above and to the right of the matrix. It’s a touch-sensitive reset button. But the main control mechanism is a Clapper clone circuit. Just snap your fingers and it turns the project on or off. [Rtty21] based the design on this step-by-step sound input build.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Arduino Hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,

Bring your own name badge

February 7, 2012 By 11 Comments

It used to be that the contents of your pocket protector directly mirrored your geek level. But that just doesn’t cut it in our fast-paced digital age. We think [Jonathan] is headed down the right track though, by creating a scrolling LED name badge which he takes to conventions with him. With the right enclosure this could reach the same geek level as Woz’s watch. There’s a lot packed into the little device, but readability at close range doesn’t look like one the features so make sure you glance at the tag before you approach him for a conversation.

As you can see, the PCB for the project is the same form factor as a landscape ID card. It hosts an 8×5 LED matrix, which meshes nicely with the registers of the MSP430 chip which runs it. He admits that the hardware may not last very long as the chip is multiplexing the display directly, with no resistors or LED drivers for current protection. But there is potential in the design. It uses a rechargeable battery (which we like) and he included a QR code in the board artwork for easy exchange of contact information. We’ve embedded his description of the project after the break. [Read more...]

Filed Under: cons, Microcontrollers Tagged With: , , ,

Building LED walls on the cheap

February 6, 2012 By 7 Comments

Around this time last year, [KopfKopfKopfAffe] was enlisted as a set designer and was told to build some sort of light effects for electronic music parties. The budget for the project wasn’t much at 200 Euros, but he did manage to build decent 5×5 RGB LED matrix that is fully controllable by a computer.

[KopfKopfKopfAffe] didn’t have the time or money to wait for manufactured PCBs, so a bunch of perfboard was placed in a CNC mill with a pen to act as a plotter. All the lines that needed soldered were drawn on by the mill, a feat that probably saved hours of looking at the design before committing solder to iron.

A total of five boards were constructed, each one capable of controlling five RGB LEDs. Each board can be dasiy-chained with an RS-232 serial connection for further expansion. The only thing that’s needed to control the matrix is 17 bits that includes an address and RGB color data for each LED. The system only cost about 10 Euros per node, but we think that could be significantly reduced by leaving out the Molex and DB-9 connectors. [Kopf] project turned out very nice, check it out after the break.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: led hacks Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »