Arduino Christmas Lights

December 1, 2013 by James Hobson 12 Comments

Here’s a cool hack to get you in the December holiday mood! Arduino controlled Christmas lights!

It all started because [Anx2k] had some leftover LED’s from one of his other projects, so he decided to make use of them as permanently mounted Christmas lights. He’s installed them underneath his tiled roof, and run all the wires into his attic where he has an electrical box serving as the main control hub. He uses an Arduino Uno to control them, and a 460W computer power supply to provide the juice. The LED modules themselves are Adafruit RGB pixel strings. There’s actually three of the LED modules per tile — two shining up to illuminate the tile, and one shining out.

He’s set up a ton of different patterns to run, and they are pretty awesome! Check out the video after the break.

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DIY Thermal Imaging Camera

December 1, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 51 Comments

Thermal imaging cameras – those really useful devices that give you Predator vision – are incredible tools. If you’re looking for heat escaping your house through a window, or just trying to figure out where your electronics project will explode next, they’re invaluable, if expensive, tools. [Kaptein QK] figured out an easy and cheap way to make your own thermal imaging camera using nothing just a few dollars worth of parts.

[Kaptein] based his camera off of a non-contact IR temperature gun. This device is useful for spot checking temperatures, but can’t produce an IR image like it’s $1000 cousins. By taking the thermopile out of this temperature gun, adding an op-amp, an A/D converter, and connecting it to an Arduino Nano with pan and tilt servos, [Kaptein] was able to slowly scan the thermopile over a scene and generate an image.

In the video below, you can see [Kaptein]’s scanning camera in action reading the ambient temperature and creating an imaging program for his PC. It works very well, and there a lot more [Kaptein] can improve on this system; getting rid of the servos and moving to mirrors would hopefully speed everything up, and replacing the 8-bit grayscale display with colors would give a vastly improved dynamic range.

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Levitating Wireless LED Ring

December 1, 2013 by James Hobson 10 Comments

magnetic levitation

Here’s an impressive example of a completely home built magnetic levitation setup… with wireless power transmission to boot!

[Samer] built this from scratch and it features two main sub-systems, a electromagnet with feedback electronics and a wireless power transfer setup.

The ring of LEDs has a stack of neodymium magnets which are levitated in place by a varying magnetic field. This levitation is achieved by using a Hall effect sensor and a PID controller using a KA7500 SMPS controller.

The wireless power transmission uses a Class E DC/AC inverter that operates at 800KHz. Two coils of wire pass the current between the stand and the LEDs.

It’s very similar to a build we featured last year, but it’s a great hack, so we had to share it! Check out the video after the break.

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A Shell For The Stellaris & Tiva

December 1, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

cli

When [antoker] is working on a microcontroller project, he often has to write short bits of test code to make sure everything in his circuit is working properly. This is a time-consuming task, and a while back he started on a small side project. It’s a command line interface for a microcontroller that allows him to send short commands to the uC over a serial connection to play around with the ADC, UART, and GPIO pins.

[antoker]’s tiny Unix-like environment is based on modules that can keep track of the time, print the current commands and stack to a terminal, and query things like the current speed of the uC and the available Flash and RAM.

This tiny shell also has scripting capabilities and a jump function, making this a true programming language, however minimal it is. Right now [antoker]’s work is available for the TI Stellaris and Tiva series microcontrollers, and a video of a scripted Larson scanner is available below.

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DIY Pringles Can Speaker

December 1, 2013 by James Hobson 8 Comments

Looking for a fun weekend project? How about making your own speaker from scratch using some very basic materials?

[Go Repairs] makes a bunch of how-to videos for Instructables in a style very reminiscent of the classic Art Attack from the 90’s — very clear, concise and he’s even got the accent!

The project requires only what you see in the photo above. The lid forms a simple plastic cone of the speaker, the magnets are the core, and using some paper, tape, and enamelled wire a very basic voice coil is constructed. Don’t expect amazing sound quality out of it, but it certainly looks like a fun project for junior hackers as it requires no fancy tools or equipment!

Stick around after the break to watch the video — does it remind you of Art Attack also?

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