Bringing A Christmas Lights Show Inside

December 21, 2017 by James Hobson 15 Comments

Instructables user [Osprey22] has been building towards this Christmas for years. Why? This year, he has brought an impressive musical Christmas light display inside, and at a fraction of the cost too!

An box at the tree’s base hides the power supply and the controller boards — a Raspberry Pi and a SanDevices e682 Pixel controller for the 400 WS2811 RGB LEDs — with an added router to connect them to the main network. The Pi is running Falcon Pi Player and a projector somewhere in the region of $100 complements the light show.

As far as mapping out the LEDs, Xlights is the program of choice, locating the LEDs in space with the help of a cell phone video recording. [Osprey22] had to write a quick program in C to fix the LED overlaps in the grid. (A spreadsheet would work just as well, here). Oh, and the gifts at the bottom of the tree double as a projector screen!

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Old Scanner Finds New Life In DIY PCB Fab

December 20, 2017 by Dan Maloney 33 Comments

Cheap, high-quality PCBs are truly a wonder of our age. That a professionally fabricated board with silkscreen and solder mask can be ordered online and delivered to your door has lowered the bar between a hobbyist project and a polished product. But the wait can be agonizing, and it can throw a wrench into the iterative design process. What to do?

[Andras Kabai] knows the answer to that, and this former flatbed scanner turned into a UV exposer is the centerpiece of his DIY board fab. The old Mustek scanner was a couple of bucks secondhand, and provided not only the perfect form-factor for a board scanner but a trove of valuable parts to reuse. [Andras] replaced the original fluorescent light bar with a long, narrow PCB stuffed with UV LEDs, and added an Arduino Mega to control the original stepper drive. The project looks like it went through a little feature creep, with an elaborate menu system and profiles that include controls for exposure time, the brightness of the LED array via PWM, and the length of board that gets exposed. It’s clearly a work in progress, but early results are encouraging and we’ll be watching to see how [Andras]’ in-house fab shapes up.

This approach to PCB fab is only one of many, of course. You can turn a budget 3D-printer into a PCB machine, or even use an LCD to mask the boards during exposure. The latter intrigues us — an LCD mask and a scanning UV light source could make for a powerful PCB creation tool.

Aluminum Foil Heatsink Keeps LEDs In Check

December 20, 2017 by Tom Nardi 24 Comments

In your kitchen is very likely a roll of aluminum foil, like most people you probably use it to line pans or wrap food for baking. If you heard somebody used aluminum foil in the cooling of items, you could be forgiven for thinking they were referring to wrapping leftovers and tossing them in the refrigerator. But rather than preserving Mom’s famous meatloaf, [Michael Dunn] is using that classic kitchen staple to protect his LED strips.

Cheap LED strips are becoming extremely popular and have been popping up in more and more projects, but they have a pretty serious flaw: heat dissipation. Left on their own they can get hot enough to cook themselves, which is sort of a problem when you’re looking to replace as much of your home lighting with them like [Michael] is.

Heat was of particular concern as he was looking to retrofit a delicate shade with his beloved LED strips. Since he wanted a column of LEDs inside the unique shape of the shade, he reasoned that some kind of heat-conductive tubular structure could be used as both a mandrel to wrap the LEDs around and a way to dissipate heat. Like most of us, his first thought was copper pipe. But unfortunately the only copper pipe he had handy was of too small a diameter.

The tube of foil on the other hand was the perfect diameter, and while aluminum isn’t as good a conductor of heat as copper, it’s certainly no slouch either. Early tests weren’t that great when the tube was laying on the bench, but once it stood vertically convection got the air moving and cooled the LEDs down to where [Michael] was comfortable enough to put them inside the shade. Though he does have some lingering doubts about leaving the cardboard tube in such a toasty environment.

Going back through the archives, we’ve seen some absolutely fantastic projects utilizing LED strips in the past, some of which have come up with their own creative ways of beating the heat.

Resurrecting Dead LED Lightbulbs

December 19, 2017 by Tom Nardi 29 Comments

If you’ve gone down the lighting isle of a store recently, you’ve no doubt noticed we are firmly in the age of the LED light bulb. Incandescent bulbs are kept in small stock for those who still have the odd-ball use case, there’s usually a handful of CFL bulbs for those who don’t mind filling their house with explosive vials of hot mercury, but mostly its all LED now. Which is as it should be: LED lighting is clearly the superior choice in terms of energy efficiency, lifetime, and environmental impact.

Unfortunately, a lot of the LED bulbs you’ll see on the rack are of pretty poor quality. In an effort to drive cost down corners get cut, and bulbs which should run for decades end up blowing after a couple of months. After yet another one failed on him, [Kerry Wong] decided to do a teardown to examine the failure in detail.

He notes that most of the LEDs seem to fail in the same way, flickering after they are switched on until they just stop lighting up entirely. This hints at an overheating issue, and [Kerry] opines that aesthetic and cost considerations have pushed heat dissipation to the back burner in terms of design. It also doesn’t help that many of these bulbs are sitting in insulated recessed fixtures in the ceiling, making it even harder to keep them cool.

Once he separates the actual LEDs from the driver circuitry, he is able to determine that the emitters themselves still work fine. Rather than toss the whole thing in the trash, it’s possible to reuse the LEDs with a new power source, which is quickly demonstrated by showing off a shop light he built from “dead” LED light bulbs.

[Kerry Wong] isn’t the only one to put his LED bulbs under the knife. We’ve covered a number of teardowns which explore the cutting edge of home lighting; for better or for worse.

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A Futuristic Plant To Inspire Bright Ideas

December 4, 2017 by James Hobson 16 Comments

A good video game prop can really spruce up the decor — doubly so if it’s a glowing, futuristic potted plant transplanted(sorry!) straight from Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Since it’s a bit difficult to grow neon light vines, this project is more lamp than plant. The maker with the green thumb is [Phil], from [JumperOneTV], and he is using five meters of warm white strip LEDs cut to varying vine lengths. He’s also procured a store-bought flower pot that conveniently mirrors the in-game model. The vines are made of 16mm polyethylene tubing which he’s shaped using a heat gun — setting their shape by pumping water through it — and secured in the pot with insulation foam. Feeding the LED strips through and wiring them in parallel was simple compared to his next conundrum: supplying the power.

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Finally, A Fidget Spinner We Can Love

November 26, 2017 by Al Williams 20 Comments

We’ve been frankly mystified at the popularity of fidget spinners. After all, we can flip an ink pen around just fine. However, [MakersBox] just sold us on what he calls the geek spinner. The fact that the spinner is actually a PCB and has parts on it, would probably have been cool enough. However, the spinner also has a persistence of vision LED set up and can display 12 characters of text as it spins. Because the board is simple and uses through hole components, it would be a great project for a budding young hacker. You can see a video below.

The instructions are geared towards someone attempting their first project, too. If you know how to solder and insert a DIP IC, you might find you’ll skim them, but it is pretty straightforward. The 8 LEDs on one side operate from an ATTiny CPU, which you can program with an Arduino. The spinner has a hall effect sensor and a magnet to figure out the index position of the spin — crucial for displaying text.

Although the board attempts to balance the components, the battery side is apparently a little heavy. The suggestion is to add some weight using some hardware or solder to that side. Speaking of solder, the bearing in the center solders to the PCB. That’s going to take a lot of heat, so maybe you can finally use Dad’s soldering gun that has been gathering dust under your bench.

We liked the polar graph provided to help you set up the code for your own messages. The text implies there is a picture of one of these graphs filled out, but we think he forgot to include that picture. However, it is clear enough how to use it, and it would make it very easy to make your own text or any design that the spinner could produce.

This isn’t the first POV spinner, by the way. [MakersBox] has a nice set of acknowledgments for projects he’s seen or borrowed from, but the other one he mentions uses surface mount. Granted, surface mount isn’t a problem for most people these days, but starting out, it might be nice to stick with a through-hole design. If you want a more useful spinner, you can always make some music.

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Building A Skyrim Quest Marker

November 23, 2017 by John Baichtal 6 Comments

I’m working on a Skyrim quest marker. You probably know what this is even if you never have played the game. When a character or location in the game relates to a quest, an arrow floats over it so you don’t miss it. If it’s a book, the book has the arrow floating over it. If it’s a person, it floats over that character’s head. It is that quest marker I aim to re-create.

I sat down in front of my sketchbook and drew the basic parameters. I wanted it to be approximately to scale to the human/elf/orc heads it usually floats above. I ended up going with around 9 inches from top to bottom. In terms of thickness, any amount of blatant dimensionality is bad, as the game element exists in only 2 dimensions. That said, I will be re-creating this thing in the real world, and LEDs and acrylic and plywood and other things need to go inside.

I decided to make it around 1.25 inches thick, which would include enough space for a 9V battery if I so chose, plus a proto board and microcontroller.

Designing the Electronics

Before I finalized the dimensions I had to design the circuit. Originally I looked at Adafruit’s backlight LED panels, but I felt it would be too hard to fit into the pointy parts of the enclosure, both physically and in terms of light distribution. Instead I went with a strand of cold white LEDs, not individually addressable but only require power and GND to light up. However, the strand is WAY too bright straight from the battery. Fortunately, the strand is PWMable so I am using an Adafruit Trinket ATtiny85 breakout to dim it down somewhat.

I chose a TIP-120 for the switching, a part highly recommended by our own [Adam Fabio]. Power supply will be my wall wart; if I were to take it out into the wild, I could put a 9V battery inside the enclosure — there’s room — but I think I’ll just have it at home this time around.

Designing the Enclosure

I decided to be flexible with my design. I was going use the laser cutter to cut each layer of the marker out of eighth-inch material. The front will have a bezel holding the acrylic in place, while the back is just a blank piece of plywood. The interior layers, of unknown quantity (as I designed it) would determine the overall thickness of the marker.

I opened up Inkscape and went to work designing the layers. I did everything in a single Inkscape file with each layer corresponding with a similar layer on the design.

Closer to lasering, when I have a good sense of the projects’s final parameters, I’ll distribute the layers on a series of 12”x12” Inkscape canvases, and I’ll print directly from these. This will allow me to cut some filler projects in the unused portion of the boards, because I’m cheap like that.

The topmost bezel was easy — it’s supposed to look a specific way. I dropped a GIF from the ‘nets into Inkscape and traced it. I duplicated that layer and made the bottom plate, which is basically just a filled-in version of the bezel. There needed to be the vinyl for the light-emitting part, with some sort of bezel keeping it in place. There also needed to be a board for the LEDs, and beneath the LED board there needed to be room for a small circuit board.

I ended up making the whole thing 10 layers thick: Beginning from the top: the outer bezel; then the acrylic and its carrier, which nestle together — I didn’t want any light escaping from the sides. The third layer is an “under bezel” which lifts the acrylic up 1/8” because the LED strips are covered in a little “hill” of plastic. Fourth, the LED plate, painted white with lengths of LED strip attached to it.

I consider those four layers to be the top of the project. The next six are the bottom, consisting of five identical layers making up the electronics compartment, with the back plate, which also has a hole for the power supply and also mounts the protoboard. Each layer is 1/8″ thick, for an overall thickness of 1.25″ — not too bad. It’s somewhat on the heavy side. (By the way, you can find the Inkscape file in the project page.)

Lasering

The first fifteen minutes of lasering was hell, as I got all the settings figured out. But once I got everything dialed in, it was a breeze.

The layers were split onto 12″x12″ sheets, with two layers per. So I imported 1″x2″ rectangles with horse shapes on them, and you can see them on the right. We use these in my gaming group for horses, with a figure sitting on top of it to show he or she is mounted.

Once I got dialed into my favorite settings, the lasering went quite well. The wood was about one notch lower in terms of quality than what I’m used to, and I felt like the glue was just a little more refractory or whatever. Still, most of the parts came out perfectly.

I was mostly worried about the acrylic. I took a chance with some translucent white acrylic I found on Amazon. Having never used it before, or had a clear understanding (sorry) of how translucent it was, I bought it sight unseen. Furthermore, I had enough real estate on my 12″x12″ sheet for maybe 3 cuts, so I wanted to get the right settings ASAP.

It worked better than I could have hoped. Someone at the hackerspace had written the best ratio of speed and power on the laser cutter room’s whiteboard walls — 15 speed, 8 power. I ran it through twice to be sure, but it came out perfect, and slid into place like a charm.

The Build

I glued the bottom six layers right there in the hackerspace, as well as the two-layer carrier for the acrylic. All I needed to do was paint the thing, add the electronics, and bolt it together.

Originally I’d envisioned a battery pack inside a harness of some sort, with a black-painted PVC pipe hoisting the marker overhead. That seems like a lot to tackle between now during my first run at the project, so I converted the idea to a tabletop version that uses a wall wart.

When I was prototyping the electronics it had occurred to me that I might be a little ridiculous about the Trinket — what if it didn’t need to be PWMed down? Oh, but it does. LED strips run at full brightness are awfully bright, and that cold white that has all the subtlety of a klieg light. They definitely need to be PWMed down.

The strip comes with a 3M adhesive backing, which was great, However, the solder pads that were most accessible were on the underside, as the top is covered in a plastic bubble that is hard to cut away, even with a sharp knife.

For the future development, I plan to swap in an ESP and use it as a Twitter alert. In addition, the enclosure was hastily designed and lacked a certain polish. For instance, I would like to use trapped nuts on the top three layers to secure the front bezel from behind, so it doesn’t have those intrusive socket heads showing — or at least inset them somehow.

But all in all I’m happy to have the enclosure work out so well the first try. After countless lasered projects with every grade of success from “abject debacle” on up, maybe I’m starting to get a hang of it! Check out the project page on Hackaday.io.