LED Hacks

1923 Articles

This LED Strip Clock Aims To Make Your Next One Easier, Too

February 28, 2026 by 13 Comments

At first glance, it may look like [Rybitski]’s 7-segment RGB LED clock is something that’s been done before, but look past the beautiful mounting. It’s not just stylishly framed; the back end is just as attentively executed. It’s got a built-in web UI, MQTT automation, so Home Assistant integration is a snap, and allows remote OTA updates, so software changes don’t require taking the thing down and plugging in a cable.

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Driving WS2812Bs With Pure Logic

February 26, 2026 by 6 Comments

The WS2812B has become one of the most popular addressable LEDs out there. They’re easy to drive from just about any microcontroller you can think of. But what if you don’t have a microcontroller at all? [Povilas Dumcius] decided to try and drive the LEDs with raw logic only.

The project consists of a small board full of old-school ICs that can be used to drive WS2812Bs in a simplistic manner. A 74HC14 Schmitt trigger oscillator provides the necessary beat for this tune, generating an 800 kHz clock to keep everything in time and provide the longer pulse trains that represent logic one to a WS2812B. A phase-shifted AND gate generates the shorter pulses necessary to indicate logic zero. Meanwhile, a binary counter cycles through 24 bits (8 per R, G, and B) to handle color. Pressing each one of the three push-buttons allows each color channel to be activated or deactivated as desired. It can make the strip red, green, or blue, or combine the channels if you press multiple buttons at once. That’s all the control you get—it would take a bit more logic to enable variable levels of each channel. Certainly within the realms of possibility, though.

We’ve featured some other nifty tricks for driving WS2812Bs in unconventional ways, like using DMA hardware or even I2S audio outputs. If you’ve got your own tricks, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline.

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Building An Interactive Climbing Wall

February 25, 2026 by 6 Comments

Climbing is a cool sport. With that said, like everything, it’s even better if you integrate lots of glowing colorful LEDs. To that end, [Superbender] worked up this fun climbing wall that features interactive lighting built right in.

Structurally, there’s nothing too wild going on here. It’s a wood-framed climbing structure that stands 10 meters long and 2.5 meters high, and can be covered in lots of climbing holds. It’s the electronic side of things where it gets fun. An Arduino Due is installed to run the show, hooked up with a small TFT display and some buttons for control. It’s then hooked up to control a whole bunch of LEDs and some buttons which are scattered all across the wall. It’s also paired with an Arduino Nano which runs sound feedback, and a 433 MHz remote for controlling the system at a distance.

[Superbender] uses the lighting for fun interactive games. One example is called Hot Lava, where after each climbing pass, more holds are forbidden until you can’t make the run anymore. Chase the Blues is another fun game, where you have to climb towards a given hold, at which point it moves and you have to scamper to the next one.

We’ve featured similar projects before from other inventive climbers.

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Modded Lightbox Makes For Attractive LED Matrix Display

February 24, 2026 by 5 Comments

If you’ve been to a wedding or a downtown coffee shop in the last 10 years, you’ve probably seen those little lightboxes that are so popular these days. They consist of letters placed on a plastic frame in front of a dim white light, and they became twee about five minutes after your hipster friend first got one. However, they can also make a neat basis for an LED display, as [Folkert van Heusden] demonstrates. 

The build is straightforward enough, using daisy chains of 32×8 LED matrix modules, two each for the three rows of the lightbox. This provides for a 24 character textual display, or a total display resolution of 64 x 24 pixels. An ESP8266 is used to command the matrixes, which are run by MAX7219 display controllers. Thanks to the microcontroller’s onboard wireless hardware, the display can be addressed in a number of ways, such as using the LedFX DDP protocol or [Folkert’s] Pixel Yeeter python library. Files are on GitHub for the curious.

Quite a few of these exist out in the wild — [Folkert] has built a variety of modded lightboxes over the years with varying internals. The benefit of the lightbox is that it effectively acts as a handy housing for LED matrixes and supporting electronics, while also providing a neat diffuser effect. The lightboxes are also readily wall mountable and generally look more like an intentional piece of signage than most things we might homebrew in the lab.

We’ve featured similar-looking builds before, like this public transit display that was hacked for custom use. If you’re building your own public information boards or other nifty LED displays, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

A Candle-Powered Light

February 23, 2026 by 24 Comments

For a little over two thousand years, the primary light sources after the sun had set were oil lamps and candles. This was well before the age of fossil fuels, so these oil lamps were often fueled with a labor-intensive agricultural product like olive oil. Candles were similarly difficult to make, made from tallow, beeswax, or even butter. Labor and materials costs aside, though, there’s a surprising amount of energy in these fuels and [Maciej Nowak Projects] has a generator that help these ancient light sources generate some electricity on the side.

The generator is based around a piece of technology called a thermoelectric generator (TEG), which produces a voltage potential when placed in a temperature gradient. These aren’t new technologies, but their typically low efficiencies limit where they can be effectively used. In this case, however, [Maciej Nowak] has gone to great effort to boost this efficiency as high as possible by using a huge radiator on the cool side of the TEG and another one on the hot side, which in this case is heated by a small tea candle. The electricity produced is sent to a tiny DC converter which regulates the voltage to 3.3V, which then powers two custom-built pedestal lamps on either side of the TEG, each with a high-efficiency LED mounted to a custom-made circuit board.

Although this is certainly not the first time a TEG has been set up to run a small lighting system, we do appreciate this one for its polish, design, and high efficiency. It would make a fitting addition to anyone’s emergency power outage kit as it really increases the amount of available light produced from any given candle. When taken to the extreme, though, thermoelectric generators can be made to produce a surprising amount of energy, provided they are placed in the right environment.

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Exclamation Point Indicates Worthy Notifications

February 22, 2026 by 1 Comment

As far as punctuation goes, the exclamation mark is perhaps the most eye-catching of the bunch. That’s why [Conrad Farnsworth] thought this form would be perfect for his Home Assistant notifier build. 

The key to this build is the large bi-color printed housing in the shape of an exclamation mark. It makes for an attractive wall-hanging, but it also perfectly serves the purpose [Conrad] had in mind. Inside the enclosure is an ESP32, hooked up to a string of 16×8 LED matrixes which are commanded over I2C. These sit behind a white panel in the enclosure to nicely diffuse the light and make their output more readable. The ESP32 displays notifications on the LEDs that are fed from Home Assistant, such as when the mailbox sensor is triggered or if a vehicle is detected in the driveway. There’s also a bell on the unit to provide audible notifications, which us dinged with a solenoid fired via a 2N2222 transistor switching a 12 volt supply from a boost converter.

It’s a neat build that fits nicely into [Conrad]’s daily life and appears to have some genuine utility. If you’re looking for other ways to neatly display notifications where you can see them, you might consider whipping yourself up a smart mirror.

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Designing A Compact RGB 14-Segment Display

February 11, 2026 by 11 Comments

Sometimes you’re looking for a component for a project that you know should exist, but you just cannot find it. Something like a 14-segment LED display, but not just one with a fixed color, instead you want some of that sweet addressable RGB-ness. Unfortunately for [EastMakes], this particular display was nowhere to be found, so he decided to try making his own.

Using addressable SK6805 RGB LEDs with a mere 1.5 x 1.5 footprint as the basis, the layout for these individual LEDs on the PCBs was determined, and a layout created in KiCad. The PCB manufacturing and assembly were straightforward enough — the thing that really makes these displays is the diffuser. Here a few different approaches were tried, including FR4 with translucent segments in the soldermask, and a 3D printed version in both white and black PLA filament.

The FR4 approach using 0.8 mm thin PCBs looked quite all right, with the addition of through vias in the 1 mm version showing how these help to boost overall brightness. The 3D printed version prototypes didn’t look too shabby either, but it would probably help a lot if this diffuser panel also fit around the LEDs to prevent light bleeding between segments.

We’d love to see this type of RGB display being experimented with, as it seems to hold a lot of promise while also definitely being something that ought to exist.

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