I love minimal hacks. Limitations are sometimes the spark for our greatest creativity, and seeing someone do something truly marvelous with the simplest of technological ingredients never fails to put a smile on my face.
This week, it was the super-simple 1D Fireworks project by [Daniel Westhof]. Nothing more than an ESP8266 and a long RGB LED strip went into this effect on the hardware side, and indeed the code isn’t all that tricky either. But what it does is a very nice simulation of the physics that define the movement of a flare rocket and then all of the stars that explode out of it. And that makes it look so good.
Hackaday’s [Kristina Panos] is apparently also a fan of the single dimension, because she picked out some of my personal favorite uses of an LED strip, including Twang, to which we’ll admit we’re addicted, or any of the PONG versions.
But I’ve seen other games, including a button-mashing racer and various roller-coaster simulations. All with the same, essentially, two-part BOM. (OK, if you don’t count the buttons/accelerometer, or power supply.) Or this demo of sorting routines, or the Velocicoaster. And I think there’s more out there.
How much creativity can you pack into an LED strip? This sounds like we need to make a new contest…
In my quest to replicate my favourite incandescent E27 “long john” lamp with something less wasteful, I used a length of pvc conduit and wrapped a colour-corrected-white strip around it. The fixutre itself has a milky glass shade and the illusion is near perfect.
How’s the CRI though?
One of the most useful 1D tricks is a level meter. With serial LED’s all four functions of Audacity’s metering which is genius should be possible with color and blinking. Someone go for it!
Bigger isn’t always better. In this case, longer/taller is better!
It can be simple principle but leads to complex programming and decorum. My “Electronic game Arduino Tempest”, i.e a 1D led strip converted to a REAL 3D game (that you can find on YT) is one led strip (the flying saucer is not part of the game) and driven by just one pinout