Transmit Your Gaze To This Fiber Optic LED Lamp

February 3, 2021 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

Call us easily amused, but we think it’s pretty amazing what can be done with a microcontroller, some RGB LEDs, and a little bit of plastic. Case in point is [andrei.erdei]’s beautiful and quite approachable fiber optic LED lamp. It’s a desktop-friendly version of a similar piece [andrei] made that is roughly nine times the size of this one and hangs on the wall. The build may be simple, but the product is intricately lovely.

We really like the visual density of this lamp — it’s just the right amount of tubes and strikes a balance between being too sparse and too chaotic. As you might expect, there’s an Arduino and some RGB LED strips involved. But the key to this build is in the 16 pieces of side-glow plastic fiber optic tubing. Side-glow is designed to let light escape along the length of the tube as opposed to end-glow, which is made to minimize light loss from one end to the other like a data pipe. This allows for all sorts of fun effects, and you can watch [andrei.erdei] go slowly and soothingly through the different colors and modes in the demo video after the break. Make sure you watch long enough to see the tubes move like the old Windows 3D pipes screensaver

Already have too many knickknacks and wall hangings? You’re missing out on prime real estate — the ceiling. Check out this fiber optic ceiling installation that reacts to music.

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Upgrading An Old MIG Welder Wire Feeder With Arduino

February 1, 2021 by Danie Conradie 6 Comments

Older industrial equipment is often a great option if you’re on a budget, and you might even be able to add some premium features yourself. [Brett] from [Theoretically Practical] has done with his old MIG welder, adding premium control features with the help of an Arduino.

The main features [Brett] were after is pre-flow, post-flow, and a spot welding timer. Pre-flow starts the flow of shielding gas a moment before energizing the filler wire, while post-flow keeps the gas going after the weld is complete. This reduces the chances of oxygen contaminating the welds. A spot welding timer automatically limits welding time, enabling consistent and repeatable spot welds.

The Miller S-22A wire feeder can have these features, but it requires an expensive and difficult to find control unit. All it does is time the activation of the relays that control the gas flow, power, and wire feeder, so [Brett] decided to use an Arduino instead. The welders control circuit runs at 24V, so an optoisolator receives the trigger signal, and relays are used for outputs. Potentiometers were added to the original control panel, and all the wiring was neatly fitted behind it. The upgrade worked perfectly and allowed [Brett] to increase the quality of his welds. See the video after the break for the full details.

Inverter welders can be picked up for ridiculously cheap prices, if you’re willing to live with the trade-offs. We’ve also seen some other DIY welder upgrades, on small and large machines.

Electronic Embroidery Birthday Card Is A Celebration Of Skills

February 1, 2021 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Hackers and makers can sometimes feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick when it comes to gift giving. You’re out there making thoughtful, intricate circuit sculptures, helpful software, or face masks for people, and what do you get in return? Okay, yes, usually gift cards or tools or other things that feed your creativity in the first place. But darn it, it would be nice to receive a handmade gift once in a while, right?

So here’s what you do: make friends with enough other makers that you find your birthday twin, or close enough that you both feel the warmth of the personal holiday you share. Then you get them to agree to trade handmade birthday presents with you. That’s more or less what happened between [Becky Stern] and [Estefannie], who seem to have found each other through the magic of sharing projects on YouTube.

[Becky]’s gift to [Estefannie] is a busy intersection of maker elements including graphic design, embroidery, electronics, and 3D printing. [Becky] started with the embroidery, which was made possible thanks to a new open-source library for Processing called PEmbroider. Once that was done, she 3D printed the frame and added the electronics — candle flicker LEDs for the birthday cake, and a handful of songs that are accessible via touch contacts screwed into the side of the frame. [Becky] added a real-time clock module so it plays a few extra songs on [Estefannie]’s actual birthday.

The most thoughtful element here is personalization, and it’s amazing what can happen when you put 100% of yourself into something that is 100% about someone else. Every bit of the art is personal to [Estefannie], and every atom of the build is pure [Becky]. Check out the demo and build video and see what [Estefannie] made for [Becky] after the break.

[Becky]’s varied creativity has graced these pages many times before. See how she bid adieu to 2020, built a daily affirmation mirror, and gave a mask-making masterclass in the early stages of the pandemic.

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Master Video Call Control Panel Is Made Of PCBs

January 30, 2021 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

[memestra] is a teacher whose life has become a series of videoconferences over the last year or so. With all the classes and meetings, they spend the whole day switching between either Zoom, Teams, or Meet. If anyone needs a single piece of hardware to control them all, it’s [memestra]. Well, and every other teacher out there.

The hardware — an Arduino Pro Micro and some buttons — should come as no surprise, except for maybe [memstra]’s use of a resistor network for the LEDs. Still, there’s a lot to like about this little box, starting with the enclosure. That’s not milled or laser-cut metal — each side is a PCB, and they’re all soldered together into a box.

We especially like the top panel, which fits down over the PCB that all the components are soldered to. Each of the non-volume buttons has multiple functions that are accessed by pressing, long pressing, or double pressing. But even the volume buttons do double duty: press them together to mute and un-mute. If [memestra] ever forgets which button does what and how, there’s a handy reference table silkscreened on the bottom panel.

In true teacher fashion, [memestra] has written comprehensive instructions for anyone looking to build a similar device. The heavily-commented code should make it a cinch to drop in keyboard shortcuts for Discord or anything else you might be using, though it’s worth noting that this box is optimized for the desktop apps and not the browser-based versions.

Just looking for a fun way to end video calls? Pull chains are pretty fun.

LED Hourglass Moves Like The Real Thing

January 27, 2021 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

If you want to waste time in a meaningful way, get yourself an hourglass. It’s simultaneously mesmerizing and terrifying to sit there and watch the seconds slip through the threshold that separates possibility from missed opportunity.

[Ty and Gig]’s LED hourglass is equally beautiful to watch. It doesn’t actually tell time, but that’s perfectly fine by us. What it does do is animate the LEDs to approximate grains of sand in gravity, no matter how the hourglass is tilted.

In either vertical orientation, the sand falls as long as there is some in the top. When the hourglass is horizontal, the LEDs settle just like real sand does. [Ty and Gig] achieved this with a whole lot of code that breaks the animation frames into structure arrays.

By contrast, the hardware part of this build is fairly simple: all that’s needed to replicate this build is some RGB LEDs a beefy power supply to drive them, an accelerometer, and a microcontroller.

[Ty and Gig] were planning to use an ESP8266, but misplaced it and went with an Arduino Mega instead. (You know what they say — buy a replacement and the one you lost will turn up almost immediately.) The beautiful frame is made from leftover purpleheart, a hardwood that turns purple with exposure to air. Check out the build video after the break.

Too lazy to reset your hourglass every hour? Here’s one that flips itself.

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Arduino Learns The Martial Arts With Nunchucks Input Device

January 26, 2021 by Al Williams 11 Comments

There is a boring part of every computer introduction class that shows how a computer is made up of input, output, and processing. Maybe it wouldn’t be so boring if the input device was a nunchuck. [Brian Lough] thinks so and he belligerently asserts that nunchucks are the best input device ever. With a simple connection to a Wii controller and an associated library, you get access to an analog joystick, two buttons, and an accelerometer.

The nunchuck is meant to plug into a Wii controller and the connection is I²C, so that’s trivial to interface to an Arduino or other small microcontroller. The only issue is making the connection. We might have just snipped the wires, but [Brian] prefers to use a small breakout board that plugs into the stock connector and provides solder points for your own cable. There are options for the breakout boards, and [Brian] has his own design that you can get from OSHPark for about a buck for three boards. You can also just jam wire into the connector, but that’s not always robust.

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Multi-Channel Battery Monitor Aces First Sea Trial

January 20, 2021 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

A little over a a year ago, we covered an impressive battery monitor that [Timo Birnschein] was designing for his boat. With dedicated batteries for starting the engines, cranking over the generator, and providing power to lights and other amenities, the device had to keep tabs on several banks of cells to make sure no onboard systems were dipping into the danger zone. While it was still a work in progress, it seemed things were progressing along quickly.

But we know how it is. Sometimes a project unexpectedly goes from having your full attention to winning an all-expense-paid trip to the back burner. In this case, [Timo] only recently put the necessary finishing touches on his monitor and got it installed on the boat. Recent log entries on the project’s Hackaday.io page detail some of the changes made since the last time we checked in, and describe the successful first test of the system on the water.

Certainly the biggest issue that was preventing [Timo] from actually using the monitor previously was the lack of an enclosure and mounting system for it. He’s now addressed those points with his 3D printer, and in the write-up provides a few tips on shipboard ergonomics when it comes to mounting a display you’ll need to see from different angles.

The printed enclosure also allowed for the addition of some niceties like an integrated 7805 voltage regulator to provide a solid 5 V to the electronics, as well as a loud piezo beeper that will alert him to problems even when he can’t see the screen.

Under the hood he’s also made some notable software improvements. With the help of a newer and faster TFT display library, he’s created a more modern user interface complete with a color coded rolling graph to show voltages changes over time. There’s still a good chunk of screen real estate available, so he’s currently brainstorming other visualizations or functions to implement. The software isn’t using the onboard NRF24 radio yet, though with code space quickly running out on the Arduino Nano, there’s some concern about getting it implemented.

As we said the first time we covered this project, you don’t need to have a boat to learn a little something from the work [Timo] has put into his monitoring system. Whether you’re tracking battery voltages or temperatures reported by your BLE thermometers, a centralized dashboard that can collect and visualize that data is a handy thing to have.