ColorReplica Is A Rainbow At Your Fingertips

November 16, 2023 by 15 Comments

Have you ever wanted to match paint to the color of a pillow, or make a website where the primary color matches your favorite shade of electrolytic capacitor? Then ColorReplica is the project for you.

At the heart of this build are two ESP32s, one of which controls the color picker, and the other lights up the 18 WS2812 LEDs and displays information on the OLED screen.

ColorReplica has two modes, ColorPicker and ColorCube. In ColorPicker mode, you just choose what color you want, adjust the brightness level, and choose between static and dynamic modes for the LEDs. [CiferTech] used the ESP32 touch pins extended to pads on the PCB to control different menu variables, which is a nice touch.

In ColorCube mode, there’s a secondary circuit with a color sensor an another ESP32. Once detected, it transmits the color data to the main device at the push of a button. The RGB LEDs turn that color, and shows the RGB, HEX, and HSV values on the OLED screen. If you’d like to make one of these yourself, everything is available on GitHub.

Want something a big more tangible? Check out this color picker that types HEX codes for you.

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A Tiny Board For Driving LEDs In…Whatever

October 26, 2023 by 19 Comments

Whether you’re into chiptune or just playing Tetris on original hardware, you might like rocking a heavily-customized Game Boy. Lovely flashing LEDs can only improve the aesthetic, so if that’s what you’re after, you might consider the ARCCore board from [NatalieTheNerd].

The board is a compact and easy way to drive some addressable LEDs, with a form factor designed to take up a small amount of space when stuffed into a Game Boy or other game console. It rocks an RP2040 microcontroller set up to drive a strip of WS2812B LEDs. Three buttons are used to configure the color and brightness settings. The board is designed to run on 3.3 to 5 V, thanks to an onboard buck converter. It’s capable of delivering enough juice to run up to 10 RGB LEDs, though you could potentially use more if you ran them from external power.

You can use just about any microcontroller on the market today to run addressable LEDs if you so desire. If you want a compact drop-in solution that takes up less space, though, you might find the ARCCore useful. If you’ve got your own nifty kit for running addressable LEDs, don’t hesitate to share it with the broader hacker massive — hit the tipsline!

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Candy Basket Sees You Coming

October 14, 2023 by 5 Comments

On Halloween, some people can’t or don’t want to open the door for various reasons. Maybe they have a cat that likes to escape every chance it gets, or maybe their favorite TV show is on during prime trick-or-treating time. Whatever the case, we think it’s perfectly acceptable to leave a bowl of candy outside the door, especially if there are electronics involved.

In this case, the bowl detects trick-or-treaters and candy eaters using an LD2410 60 GHz radar sensor and an RP2040. A light pipe shows orange when a person is detected, and switches over to green as they come closer, as if to say you may have candy now.

Nothing happens after that, but now that we think about it, it would be cool to add an MP3 decoder and a speaker to play a little witch cackle or something once they’ve had a chance to stick their hand in the bucket.

[Mike Kushnerik] actually designed the PCB a few months ago for non-Halloween purposes: some home automation projects. But then they were trying to think of something for Halloween, and this delightful light-up bucket came to mind. In addition to the RP2040 chip, there’s a 128 MB flash chip, a WS2812 LED, and a header for communicating with the radar sensor over UART. Be sure to check out the brief demo video after the break.

If you’d like to stand outside and give out candy, at least send it down a light-up slide or something.

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Giant LED Matrix Fills Blank Space In The Kitchen

October 9, 2023 by 8 Comments

We’ve all got one: a blank space somewhere in our home that we don’t know what to do with. [James Miller] had one above his kitchen cabinets, so he filled it with a giant LED matrix. The result is a large but surprisingly attractive LED screen that can send messages, provide illumination, or while away the idle hours of the night playing Conway’s Game of Life.

[James] built the matrix using the usual suspect for these builds: several strings of WS2812 lights . He initially ran this from a Raspberry Pi, but realized that there was no need for such a dizzying amount of computing power, so he switched to an ESP32 instead. The frame is built from wood and foam board.

The first version he built used a fabric diffuser, but after a close encounter with a flaming steak, he switched over to commercial ceiling light diffusers cut down to size. We might have been tempted to keep going and try an “egg crate” style ceiling light panel for a the smaller pixel size, but [James] thinks he has reached the “good enough” point of this project. It’s certainly a fun build, and it looks very cool with minimal materials.

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Minimalist LED Lamp Is Circular Beauty Incarnate

September 4, 2023 by 8 Comments

Lamps used to be things built to provide light with specific purpose, whether as reading lamps, desk lamps, or bedside table lamps. Now we just build them for the vibes, as with this minimalist LED lamp from [andrei.erdei].

The build uses a 3D-printed frame printed in opaque grey, with a diffuser element printed in a more translucent white. This is key to allowing the LED to nicely glow through the lamp without ugly distracting hotspots spoiling the effect. The lamp mounts 36 WS2812B LEDs in strip form. These are controlled from an Arduino Nano running the FastLED library for lightweight and easy control of the addressable LEDs. Smooth rainbow animations are made easy by the use of the HSV color space, which is more suitable for this job than the RGB color space you may otherwise be more familiar with.

[andrei.erdei] does a great job of explaining the build, including the assembly, electronics, and code aspects. The latter could serve as a particularly good resource if you’re just starting out on your own builds in the blinky, glowable space. Video after the break.

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A WiFi RGB Camera Grip Is Probably Not Ideal For Night Shoots

August 29, 2023 by 1 Comment

RGB LEDs can be found on everything from motherboards to sticks of RAM these days. [dslrdiy] wanted to bring this same visual flair to his camera setup, so built what he’s calling the world’s first RGB camera grip.

The build is based on an existing off-the-shelf camera grip. It’s disassembled for the build, with a pair of 18650 lithium batteries installed inside as a power supply. They run a small DC-DC converter, which powers a Raspberry Pi Zero and a WS2812B LED strip which provides the lovely colorful lighting effects. The LEDs light up a translucent spacer installed in the camera grip solely for the purpose of aesthetics.

So far, so straightforward. However, [dslrdiy] also implemented one more useful feature. The Pi Zero is able to scrape photos from the camera, and automatically load them on to a Windows network share. That’s a nice zero-fuss way to get pictures off your camera when you return to your home network.

We’re not sure too many professional photographers will rush after the RGB grip, as it’s often poor practice to introduce strange uncontrolled colorful lights into a scene. However, the wireless tethering feature does seem attractive depending on your usual workflow. Video after the break.

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A Nifty Tool For Counting Neopixels

August 16, 2023 by 25 Comments

Picture it. You’ve got a big roll of NeoPixels, but you have no idea how many are actually on the tape. Or you need to count how many WS2812B LEDs are in a display to properly plan your animations. Fear not, for [Gustavo Laureano] has built the perfect tool for counting the addressable LEDs.

The tool is based on a Raspberry Pi Pico, so it’s easy to replicate at home. The LED strip is simply connected to the microcontroller via a set of jumper wires going to the 5V and GND pins, while one of the Pico’s ADC pins is then connected to the strip’s GND pin after the jumper. A further GPIO pin is used to send data to the strip.

Essentially, this uses the jumper wire as a rudimentary current shunt. The code steps through the string of LEDs, turning each one on and then off in turn, comparing the value read by the ADC pin at each state. When the Pico detects no difference in current draw between the on and off states, that suggests it’s trying to turn on an LED beyond the end of the string, and thus the count is concluded.

You don’t need to understand any of that to put this device to good use, however. You can easily whip it up on a breadboard with a Pi Pico and parts you have lying around in the shop. Video after the break.

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