LEDs Invade Coffee Table Crevice

March 8, 2010 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

That’s a lot of LEDs, and a little bit of glass cleaner. [Tobias] spiced up his IKEA coffee table by adding 6144 LEDs. This is a larger realization of SparkFun’s LED coffee table which used 64 8×8 modules. [Tobias] sourced three display boards from Sure Electronics for a total of 96 8×8 modules. These boards are addressed through a serial interface; four serial lines for each board but a shared data bus for each of the row select pins and the data/latch/clock pins. This method uses 19 of the 20 pins on the Arduino that drives the display. After the break you can see a demonstration. If this is more than you need there’s always the 112-LED and 81-LED table projects that can produce a full color range. Continue reading “LEDs Invade Coffee Table Crevice” →

Lava Lamp Centrifuge

March 8, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 72 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-i9iI0ZA4M]

Like many projects, this one started with a harmless question. “Will lava lamps work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter?”. Well, as it turns out, this harmless question was not so easily answered. The only real solution was to test and prove for sure. To do this, [Neil Fraser] built a centrifuge in his living room. At 10 feet across and roughly 50 kilograms, this is no small toy. The end with the lava lamp is set to pivot, so at a stand still, it is positioned vertically and at full speed it is positioned horizontally. The whole process is recorded on video for proof. So, does a lava lamp work in high gravity? Watch the video or read the article to find out.

[via Makezine]

Time Delay Door Alarm

March 6, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

Ever accidentally left your front door ajar and had a pet escape? [BlackCow] came up with a simple solution to this problem. The circuit is fairly rudimentary but a great example of using the basics to get the job done. Now, instead of having an alarm that sounds as soon as the door is open, he has a 30 second delay. This helps avoid the “boy who cried wolf” effect also known as the “vista security warning” effect of being bothered too many times for a non issue. We also have to say that we like his taste in blog layouts.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

Shiftbrite Coffee Table

February 25, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

Here’s a project we’ve been wanting to do for a while. Over at macetech.com they’ve posted an LED coffee table that uses a 9×9 RGB LED grid. For the LEDs, they used the shiftbrite modules we’ve seen before. The table is capable of displaying pre written patterns as well as accepting patterns from a computer via bluetooth. They’ve set it up to connect to a twitter feed and display to a live cam on their site. Though we would love to reproduce this, we need a little more justification than “ooooh, shiny” for the funds involved. Anyone want to donate 100 shiftbrights?

Controllable LEDs Spice Up The Living Room

February 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyjDcAzNJQ0]

[Sprite_tm] brings us another great hack by lighting up the living room. Unsatisfied with just replacing incandescent bulbs with an LED alternative he went with strips of LEDs to illuminate the length of a wall. Starting with a seven-meter strip of the lights, he cut it down to fourteen pieces in order to make the RGB devices individually controllable. [Sprite_tm] whipped up a design for controller boards using RS-485 to communicate with each, and sourcing an ATtiny2313 for the PWM necessary to generate any color. As you can see in the video above, the finished project is brilliant. Oh, and the Lounge Music as a background is nice too.

Rube Goldberg FTW

February 20, 2010 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

This video was on its way to a links post until we saw the game of chess right in the middle of it (bishop to H5). [Tom] and [Ben] put their Master of Manufacturing Engineering degrees to use by jam-packing every conveyance method possible into a Rube Goldberg machine. There’s violin bows, a polo mallet, a rolling candle, a ball-popping umbrella, texting cell phones, toppling jewel cases, and plenty of ball-on-tracks implementations. All of that setup and all that the device does is… well, you’ll have to see for yourself.

[Thanks Phil via DVICE]

CueCat, Meet Arduino

February 10, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUO3vn-ivqo]

Have you ever felt like you needed a portable barcode scanner around the house? No? Well, [Mkanoap] did, so he made one. He has hooked his CueCat up to his Arduino to capture barcode data and store it on an SD card. He is using it as an inventory tool for his personal library. Where before he had to carry a laptop around to do his scanning, or lug the books to his desk, he now just scans wherever he pleases.

You may notice some silly sounds dubbed over the video. Take note, these are the actual sounds it plays. The camera didn’t pick them up well enough, so he dubbed them in. You wouldn’t want to miss out on the entire experience would you?