[Dan] is an element collector, someone who gets his socks knocked off by bismuth crystals and the orange vapor of bromine. Of course every element collector needs a proper display case, and since the periodic table table idea is cliché, [Dan] decided to build an elemental display that’s also a really awesome LED wall.
The build started off as most do with a few sheets of plywood and 120 acrylic shelves for each item in [Dan]’s collection. The real magic happened when [Dan]’s buddy [Bill] was called in to make the display a little more interesting.
Behind each acrylic shelf is a three-LED section of a LED strip, each part of the periodic table having a different color. The 120 individual shelving units are broken down into 16-shelf groups, each driven by a custom LED driver board. These driver boards are connected to a master Arduino with phone cables and make wonderful use of a very neat TCL5940 Arduino library.
The elemental display has a few options; all-on, twinkling, an Apple ‘breathing’ mode, and a graphic eq, as shown in the video after the break.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnnKbogDro&w=580]
“Elements in harmony…”
Ha!
That is pretty dang rad.
I would feel slightly edgy about having all the sample vials simply setting on the little shelves. A cat/earthquake/etc would make a real mess of it.
Not to bad mouth, it is an amazing piece of work, but since he was working with plexiglass and leds why not have the name, number, symbol, etc… of each element in front of the shelf as an illuminated sign, now that would be awesome(er).
Unique idea, well built, well documented, well executed, and great video editing. Awesome project if I’ve ever seen one.
Why would he need “120 acrylic shelves for each item”? That seems a bit exessive.
And the grammar natzis strike again
That would be due to all the additional isotopes for each element, of course!
No one wants their extra neutrons laying around all willy nilly, right? Would you?!
Excellent Build, and I appreciate the reference to my project as well in the description. :-)
Of course Arren, thanks again for trying to help me with the finicky Ti chips a year or so ago. By the way, I finally figured out what I was doing to fry them so regularly, they cannot be powered up after the master controller has already started clocking them. The initial state must have all the clocks line low or floating. If not, they fry. There’s a small off hand warning in the spec sheet about this that I had missed.
I have no sound on my machine at work but when watching the film silently my brain was substituting in the soundtrack from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Simon
Pretty piss-poor build quality if you look at the build video. I don’t know why one would go to all this effort and not bother to clean the edges of your plywood, or why he routed the cables for each shelf on the front side.
You apparently weren’t paying attention to the video, all the cabling is routed on the BACK of the boards. And the edges were sanded.