Auto dimmer hacked into keyboard backlight

keyboard-backlight-auto-adjustment

As the title says, [José Faria] added the ability to adjust his keyboard backlight based on ambient light levels. But that’s just one of the things he did during his hacking extravaganza with this Razer BlackWidow Ultimate.

When he first received the peripheral he didn’t like the blue LEDs used as backlights. So he removed all of them and … Read the rest

Better PWM on the Raspberry Pi

pi

[Thomas] wanted to play around with a few high-power LEDs and a RaspberryPi. LED controllers usually require some form of PWM to change the brightness of a LED, and unfortunately the Pi only has one PWM pin. [Thomas] could have gotten around this with a custom chip or even an Arduino hanging off the Pi’s USB port. He opted to Read the rest

Making better noises with dual PWM

pwm_16b_sm

Although it’s technically possible to get 16 bits of resolution on a ATMega328, most implementations of PWM on everyone’s favorite ‘mega – including just about every Arduino sketch – are limited to 8 bit PWM. This means the pins can only output 256 different values, so if you’re playing around with music made on an Arduino don’t expect very high … Read the rest

Morse code flower is trying to tell you something

morse-code-flower

To the casual observer this flower looks nice as its illuminated center fades in and out. But there’s hidden meaning to that light. Some of the blinks are longer than others; this flower is using Morse Code.

[Renaud Schleck] wanted to try a few different things with his MSP430 microcontroller. He decided on an LED that looks like a … Read the rest

MOD player for the Stellaris Launchpad

[Ronen K.] wrote in to tell us about the MOD playing Stellaris Launchpad project he recently completed. A MOD is a sound file for the computers of days long gone. But you’ll certainly recognize the sound of the 8-bit goodness that is coming out of this device.

To understand how a MOD file stores samples you might want to glance Read the rest

PWM on the Stellaris Launchpad

[Joonas] has been following TI’s ‘getting started’ tutorials for their new Stellaris Launchpad. Everything had been going swimmingly until [Joonas] reached the fourth tutorial on interrupts. To the ire of LEDs the world over, implementing PWM on the new Stellaris Launchpad is a somewhat difficult task. After banging his head against the documentation for hours, [Joonas] finally cracked his PWM Read the rest

The inner workings of servo motors

Servos seem to be the go-to option when adding motors to hobby projects. They’re easy to hack for continuous rotation for use in a robot, but with the control board intact they are fairly accurate for position-based applications. But do you know how the hardware actually works? [Rue Mohr] recently published an article that looks at the inner world of Read the rest