Massive Flexible LED Strip Display Has Too Many Pixels?

March 25, 2016 by James Hobson 27 Comments

This massive LED display was assembled on a PVC banner (it can be rolled up!) measuring 2m by 1.5m, it boasts well over 6000 pixels, and as you can see from the photo — looks fantastic.

We recently published a post on How Many LEDs are Too Many, which spawned many comments showing off even more impressive displays with even higher LED counts. This is just one of them — and making it flexible as well? That’s just the icing on the cake.

To make the display flexible, [Elektric-Junkys] had a custom PVC banner printed with stripes to help them align 58 parallel strips of WS2811 LEDs on the surface.

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TrainLight: Transit Info At A Glance

March 14, 2016 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

In a world of sensory overload, sometimes it’s nice to get the information you need without a bunch of clutter. [Savage] has created an attractive and minimalist system to display the current wait times for specific trains in his San Francisco neighborhood.

It’s basically a Spark Core and a 60 LED-per-meter strip of WS2812Bs. A 1000µF cap filters the power coming in from a switching adapter and a resistor limits the level-shifted logic going to the LEDs. Eight barriers made from card stock keep the light zones from bleeding together. The sides of the square canvas panel indicate cardinal directions and are oriented to [Savage]’s southern-facing house.

The server gets prediction data every 30 seconds using the RESTbus JSON API. [Savage] added in a bit of time for walking down the stairs, putting shoes on, and walking to each stop. TrainLight receives these times over WiFi and lights the LEDs accordingly. If a section isn’t lit at all, the wait time for that line is greater than 10 minutes. Dark green means you have 5-10 minutes to get there, and pale green means 2-5 minutes. If the LEDs are yellow, you’d better put on your running shoes.

This is a fairly simple build with a focus on subtlety. Even before guests in his house understand what they’re looking at, [Savage]’s TrainLight makes for an interesting conversational piece of blinkenlights and doubles as illumination for the stairs. There’s a slightly sped-up demo after the break.

Want to make your own? [Savage] has a tutorial page and his code is up on the gits. Blinky lights are also good for telling you whether the trains are running at all.

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How Many LEDs Are Too Many?

March 12, 2016 by Elliot Williams 23 Comments

“Should you answer a rhetorical question?” But anyway, the answer is that you can never have enough LEDs. At least that’s what [Adam Haile] at maniacallabs seems to think. So far, he’s up to 3,072.

We’ve reported on a previous big-LED build of [Adam]’s before, called the “Colossus”. And while this current display is physically smaller, it’s got a lot more LEDs. And that means a lot more, well, everything else. Weighing in at roughly 500W when full-on, with 175-part 3D printed frame and diffuser elements and driven by three Teensy 3.2 microcontrollers driving shift registers, this display is capable of putting out 60 frames per second of blinding RGB LED goodness.

The designs, adapter boards, and animation code will be posted once they’ve “had a chance to clean things up a little”. Here’s hoping that’s soon! [Edit: Code and designs are here. Thanks Adam!]

If you’re in the greater Washington DC area, you can even swing by the NoVA Maker Faire in Reston to check it out in person. If you do, tell ’em Hackaday sent you.

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Banish Dangerous Shadows Under Kitchen Cabinets

March 10, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 30 Comments

[nebulous] has a lot of problems with his kitchen cabinets. Aside from a noted lack of micro-controllers, he was especially suspicious of the dark spaces under them. Anything could be hiding there.

The core of the project is a $10 Arduino-compatible esp8266 board from digistump. The board is powered by the five volt regulator of an L298N motor driver module hooked to a power-supply. All this controls a set-of LED strips adhered to the underside of the cabinets with the traditionally bad adhesive strips with which they come standard. We can predict an hour spent bent awkwardly cursing at them, a hot-glue gun in one hand, in [nebulous]’s future. The whole set-up is housed in a SparkFun cardboard box above the microwave. You can barely tell it’s not a commercial product.

We’re not certain if we like a future where even our cabinetry has an IP address. However, this is a good weekend project that could make all our cabinetry brighter, safer, and more connected.

Turn A Free Flashlight Into LED Strips

March 8, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 34 Comments

Harbor Freight is always trying to sweeten the deal by throwing in a free flashlight, or a multimeter with a CAT III rating so poorly-met it might as well be a hand grenade. We usually donate the meters to our local hackerspace, but the flashlights tend to accumulate around the shop. Aside from borrowing the occasional magnet, we’ve not found a good use for them till now.

[Ben Brandt] realized that a ultra-low cost board such as the one likely to be in a free flashlight is probably going to contain a very easily hackable single-sided board. Which is exactly the case here. Once the plastic casing is removed it’s only a quick trip to the saw until you have four fresh mini LED strips.

[Ben] uses his hacked loot to build a neat little, “Thanks For Watching,” sign. We can picture lots of places these could fit in the occasional project, and the work to break these up into parts is less than making equivalent boards with any proto technique. We love his wooden battery compartment. Video after the break.

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Faking A Hollow State Device

March 6, 2016 by Al Williams 30 Comments

There’s been a resurgence of interest in vacuum tubes. Even if you do think audio sounds better through a tube, you have to admit the care and feeding of filaments and plate voltages isn’t trivial. [Ed Nisley] decided to sidestep all that and just build an objet d’art that looks like a tube.

A burned out halogen bulb stands in for the tube, and a ceramic base holds the bulb. It also conceals–what else–an Arduino. The Arduino drives a knock-off Neopixel LED hidden in a faux plate cap. The result is a glass envelope bathed in a cold blue and purple glow that changes under software control.

We’d really like to see this kind of tube inside some rebuilt piece of tube gear. Or maybe Korg should offer LED lighting options for their recent tube in a chip form factor. If you really want to be a top-tier tube hacker, you can always try your hand at repair.

Polyhedrone

March 4, 2016 by Jenny List 6 Comments

[Brainsmoke] had a simple plan. Make a quadcopter with lots of addressable LEDs.

Not just a normal quadcopter with ugly festoons of LED tape though. [Brainsmoke] wanted to put his LEDs in a ball. Thus was born the polyhedrone, the idea of a flying deltoidal hexecontahedron covered as you might expect with all those addressable LEDs.

A Catalan solid makes a good choice for the homebrew polyhedron builder because its faces are all identical. Thus if you are making PCBs to carry LEDs, for example, you need only create a single PCB design to use on all faces. A bit of work in KiCAD, and a single face design with interlocking edges was ready. The boards were tested, a wiring layout was worked out, and the polyhedron was assembled.

But [Brainsmoke] didn’t stop there. He produced a flight case for the polyhedron, in the form of a larger polyhedron from what looks like lasercut thin ply.

Having a finished polyhedron, the next thing was to hook up a Raspberry Pi and write some software. First in Python, then in Go.

The results are simply stunning. If the mathematics and construction of a polyhedron were not enough to make this project worth a second look, then the gallery of images should be enough. You’ll notice that this is ostensibly a quadcopter project, yet no mention of flying has been made on this page. That’s because this is still a work in progress at Tech Inc Amsterdam, and there is more to come. But it honestly doesn’t matter if this project never moves a millimeter off the ground, as far as we are concerned [Brainsmoke] has created a superbly built thing of beauty in its own right, and we like that.

As you might expect, this is just the latest of many projects featured here that have involved addressable LEDs or quadcopters. Of note among them is this LED polyhedron that cleverly closes in all its bits, and this LED-equipped quadcopter that generates very pleasing patterns with a hi-res cross of pixels.