[Shadow] sent in his ambient LED strip project. He picked up a ton of RGB (Red/Green/Blue) LEDs off of eBay and built several LED strips. To get up and running, he used an LED-wiz controller. With the off the shelf controller, this is a pretty easy project, and the ambient lighting effect looks great. Check out the video after the break or on the project page.
In 2006, we posted about [rafkep]’s similar ambient lighting project.
[RafkeP] from Divxstation has created this clever hack to clone the Philips Electronics Ambilight technology used in their flat-panels. Ambilight is an RGB backlight that changes color based on the on-screen image. It’s supposed to make the viewing experience more comfortable. The MoMoLight uses a directshow filter to calculate the average color on the top, left and right border of the screen. It sends this information to a microcontroller that does PWM control of three separate banks of red, green and blue cold-cathodes. LEDs could be used instead. Monitoring the top, left and right would be called Ambilight 3 according to Philips’s naming scheme, which doesn’t actually exist yet.
[thanks mathias vdb]
Seems reader [Bucky] is just as annoyed with those ambient orbs as we are. I fully support unique ways to present information, but this executive toy stuff is nothing to look forward to. Bucky legally acquired a traffic light and then developed a parallel interface to the traffic light to display different types of information. This project does require switching 120 volt AC, so you should make sure your comfortable with electrocuting yourself before proceeding. I hope someday lots of extra interfaces show up. Until then I guess we’ve got people like Bucky to keep us sane.
P.S. Don’t forget to give us feedback on the hackaday podcast.
Although there are a few hobbies that have low-cost entry points, amateur astronomy is not generally among them. A tabletop Dobsonian might cost a few hundred dollars, and that is just the entry point for an ever-increasing set of telescopes, mounts, trackers, lasers, and other pieces of equipment that it’s possible to build or buy. [Thomas] is deep into astronomy now, has a high-quality, remotely controllable telescope, and wanted to make it more accessible to his friends and others, so he built a system that lets the telescope stream on Twitch and lets his Twitch viewers control what it’s looking at.
The project began with overcoming the $4000 telescope’s practical limitations, most notably an annoyingly short Wi-Fi range and closed software. [Thomas] built a wireless bridge with a Raspberry Pi to extend connectivity, and then built a headless streaming system using OBS Studio inside a Proxmox container. This was a major hurdle as OBS doesn’t have particularly good support for headless operation.
There’s folk wisdom in just about every culture that teaches about renewable energy — things like “make hay while the sun shines”. But as an industrial culture, we want to make hay 24/7 and not be at the whims of some capricious weather god! Alas, renewable energy puts a crimp in that. Once again, energy supplies are slowly becoming tied to the sun and the wind.
Since “Make compute while the wind blows” doesn’t have a great ring to it, clearly our civilization needs to come up with some grid-scale storage. Over in Sardinia they’re testing an idea that sounds like hot air, but isn’t — because the working gas is CO2.
The principle is simple: when power is available, carbon dioxide is compressed, cooled, and liquefied into pressure vessels as happens at millions of industrial facilities worldwide every day. When power is required, the compressed CO2 can be run through a turbine to generate sweet, sweet electricity. Since venting tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere is kind of the thing we’re trying to avoid with this whole rigmarole, the greenhouse gas slash working fluid is stored in a giant bag. It sits, waiting for the next charge cycle, like the world’s heaviest and saddest dirigible. In the test project in Sardinia — backed by Google, amongst others — the gas bag holds 2000 tonnes and can produce 20 megawatts of power for up-to 10 hours.
Continue reading “Liquid CO2 For Grid Scale Energy Storage Isn’t Just Hot Air”
These days, Internet connectivity is ubiquitous, so you can look up live weather data on just about any device around you. Regardless, [Jozerworx] wanted a simple, clean, independent weather display, and came up with this simple design.
The build is based on the Lilygo T5 EPD devboard, which combines an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with a nice 4.7-inch e-paper display. This display has the benefit that it only uses power when it’s being updated, making it particularly suitable to run off a battery for extended periods of time. Meanwhile, the ESP32 and its inbuilt Wi-Fi connectivity allow it to query the internet for updated weather forecasts. Weather data is sourced via the OpenWeather API, which [Jozerworx] notes comes with the caveat of requiring an API key. It’s a little fussy, but if you want good weather data, there are few easier ways to get it. The display shows a forecast for the next five days, while also showing graphs of ambient temperature and humidity along with useful information like the sunset and sunrise schedule.
Files are on Github for those eager to learn more. [Jozerworx] also notes that getting started with the display is particularly easy with the inclusion of a setup mode. This allows the display to act as a Wi-Fi access point with a web page that you use enter your home Wi-Fi connection details.
We’ve featured a great many charming weather displays over the years, too. If you’re working to plot, chart, or even predict the weather—don’t hesitate to show us your cool projects over on the tipsline!
Continue reading “Build Yourself A Graphing Weather Display”
[Voria Labs] has created a whole bunch of artworks referred to as Lumanoi Interactive Light Sculptures. A new video explains the hardware behind these beautiful glowing pieces, as well as the magic that makes their interactivity work.
The basic architecture of the Lumanoi pieces starts with a custom main control board, based around the ESP-32-S3-WROOM-2. It’s got two I2C buses onboard, as well as an extension port with some GPIO breakouts. The controller also has lots of protection features and can shut down the whole sculpture if needed. The main control board works in turn with a series of daisy-chained “cell” boards attached via a 20-pin ribbon cable. The cable carries 24-volt power, a bunch of grounds, and LED and UART data that can be passed from cell to cell. The cells are responsible for spitting out data to addressable LEDs that light the sculpture, and also have their own microcontrollers and photodiodes, allowing them to do all kinds of neat tricks.
Continue reading “Neat Techniques To Make Interactive Light Sculptures”
