DIY Keyboard Backlighting Takes Forever, Worth It

LED Keyboard with Custom Lights

Want a back-lit keyboard? Make one yourself. Though you may not want to after seeing this build by [prodigydoo], who devoted 40 hours to upgrade his mechanical keyboard with a smattering of shiny.

No eye rolling just yet, though, because [prodigydoo’s] work is a monument to meticulous craftsmanship and dedication. So what if he accidentally dropped the keyboard’s PCB and cracked it? He patched that up with a few wires in true hacker-problem-solving fashion and no one will ever know.

With the electronics “safely” removed, [prodigydoo] set about desoldering every single key switch, then carefully detaching and disassembling the Cherry MX Blues. He then inserted an LED into each switch’s backplate, reassembled them, mounted the keys back on the board, then added some current-limiting resistors and heat shrink to the circuit. [prodigydoo] cut a few necessary holes for a power switch, state indicator LEDs (Caps Lock, etc.) and some under-the-board lighting, then rounded off the build by hooking up a power supply capable of running all the lights.

No microcontroller? No RGBLEDs? We like it anyway, and it seems [prodigydoo] is glad he kept it simple. Go check out the gallery for gritty details, an explanation of the circuit, and more pictures than your family vacation album.

LED Cube In An Elongated Cube Be Jammin’

LED cube and drive electronics inside an acrylic case

We get a lot of tips about LED cubes. They’re a great build to explore a lot of different things, from the circuit design, to current source and sink, and of course there’s the firmware. Why don’t we see a million of them on the front page? Well, we have seen a lot, but most of what is sent our way doesn’t exhibit such a clean build. It’s obvious that [Justin] took a lot of pride in his work on this 4x4x4 single-color cube.

Hidden away under one of the protoboards is an Arduino that drives it. A lot of the components were salvaged from the e-waste bin at his University. This includes the 12V AC wall wart he uses to power the device. A bridge rectifier converts to DC, and in addition to powering the LEDs there are a couple of USB charging ports. After the break you can see and hear it in action. The cube pulses to the music but the flip of a switch will disconnect the speaker if you want some peace and quiet to go with the light show.

If you’re looking for a challenge, this 8x8x8 RGB offering is several orders of magnitude harder to pull off… block out a lot of extra time if you do decide to take the plunge. We also heard that [Benchoff] might try to make a cube with some of those through-hole ws2812 pixels.

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POV Display Does It On The Cheap

lowBudgetPOV

[Sholto] hacked together this ultra low-budget spinning display. He calls it a zoetrope, but we think it’s actually an LED based Persistence Of Vision (POV) affair. We’ve seen plenty of POV devices in the past, but this one proves that a hack doesn’t have to be expensive or pretty to work!

The major parts of the POV display were things that [Sholto] had lying around. A couple of candy tins, a simple brushed hobby motor, an Arduino Pro Mini, 7 green LEDs, and an old hall effect sensor were all that were required. Fancy displays might use commercial slip rings to transfer power, but [Sholto] made it work on the cheap!

The two tins provide a base for the display and the negative supply for the Arduino. The tins are soldered together and insulated from the motor, which is hot glued into the lower tin. A paper clip contacts the inside of the lid, making the entire assembly a slip ring for the negative side of the Arduino’s power supply. Some copper braid rubbing on the motor’s metal case forms the positive side.

[Sholto] chose his resistors to slightly overdrive his green LEDs. This makes the display appear brighter in POV use. During normal operation, the LEDs won’t be driven long enough to cause damage. If the software locks up with LEDs on though, all bets are off!

[Sholto] includes software for a pretty darn cool looking “saw wave” demo, and a simple numeric display. With a bit more work this could make a pretty cool POV clock, at least for as long as the motor brushes hold up!

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Monster 100W LED Flashlight Produces A Whopping 8500lm!

100W LED Flashlight

[Yannick] got a hold of a 100W LED diode recently, and like any self-respecting hacker, he just had to turn it into a ridiculously over powered flash light.

The tricky thing about these diodes is that they need a high amount of DC voltage, anywhere from 32-48V typically. [Yannick’s] using a 12V sealed lead acid battery coupled with a 600W constant current boost converter which ups it to 32V at around 3.2A. He also managed to find a giant aluminum heat-sink to keep the diode from getting too hot. A 120mm fan helps to keep the heat sink nice and cool, which allows the light to be run constantly without fear of burning it out. But just in case he also has an Arduino monitoring the temperatures — oh and it provides PWM control to adjust the brightness of the light!

To focus the flashlight he bought a proper lens and reflector which can be mounted directly to the diode. At full power the LED puts out around 8500lm, which is brighter than almost all consumer projectors available — or even the high beams of a car!

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PIC Up A NeoPixel Ring And C What You Can Do Using This Tutorial

lit ringAs [Shahriar] points out in the introductory matter to his latest video at The Signal Path, Arduinos are a great way for a beginner to dig into all kinds of electronic excitement, but they do so at the cost of isolating that beginner from the nitty gritty of microcontrollers. Here, [Shahriar] gives a very thorough walkthrough of a 60-neopixel ring starting with the guts and glory of a single RGB LED. He then shows how that ring can easily be programmed using a PIC and some C.

[Shahriar]’s eval board is a simple setup that he’s used for other projects. It’s based on the PIC18F4550 which he’s programming with an ICD-U64. The PIC is powered through USB, but he’s using a separate switching supply to power the ring itself since he would need ~60mA per RGB to make them burn white at full brightness.

He’s written a simple header file that pulls in the 18F4550 library, sets the fuses, and defines some constants specific to the ring size. As he explains in the video, the PIC can create a 48MHz internal clock from a 20Mhz crystal and he sets up this delay in the header as well. The main code deals with waveform generation, and [Shahriar] does a great job explaining how this is handled with a single pin. Before he lights up the ring, he puts his scope on the assigned GPIO pin to show that although the datasheet is wrong about the un-delayed width of the low period for a zero bit, it still works to program the LEDs.

[Shahriar] has the code available on his site. He is also holding a giveaway open to US residents: simply comment on his blog post or on the video at YouTube and you could win either a TPI Scope Plus 440 with probes and a manual or a Tektronix TDS2232 with GPIB. He’ll even pay the shipping.

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800+ LED Wall With Diffuser Panel Is A Work Of Art

LED Wall

What happens when you take over 800 individually addressable super bright RGB LEDs and house them in a giant diffused panel? You get awesome. That’s what you get.

[Epoch Rises] is a small electronic music and interactive technology duo who create cool interactive projects (like this wall) for their live shows and performances. They love their WS2812B LEDs.

The cool thing about this wall is that it can take any video input, it can be controlled by sound or music, an iPad, or even generate random imagery by itself. The 800 LEDs are controlled by a Teensy 3.0 using the OctoWS2811 library from Paul Stoffregen which is capable of driving over 1000 LEDs at a whopping 30FPS using just one Teensy microcontroller. It works by using Direct Memory Access to send data over serial into the Teensy’s memory and directly out to the LEDs with very little overhead — it is a Teensy after all!

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Beamboarder Lets You Skate At Night; Won’t Blind Oncoming Traffic

beam-boarder-night-skating

Whether you use your longboard as transportation or pleasure riding, night-time sessions can be harrowing if you’re screaming through poorly-lit places. The Beamboarder is a solution that is simple to build and easy to throw in a backpack whenever that giant ball of fire is above the horizon.

Boiled down it’s a high-power LED and a Lithium battery. How’s that for a hack? Actually it’s the “garbage” feel of it ([Lyon’s] words, not ours) that makes us smile. An old hard drive with as high of a capacity as possible was raided for parts. That sounded like a joke at first but the point is that early, large drives have bigger magnets inside. You need a really strong one because that’s all that will hold the LED to the front truck of our board. From there it’s a matter of attaching a CREE LED with thermal adhesive and wiring it up to the Lithium pack that has been covered in shrink tube to keep the elements out.

The headlight is under the board, which is courteous to oncoming traffic. Once you pull off this hack we’re sure you’ll want to go further so we suggest wheels with LED POV displays and there’s always the option of going full electric.