Sailing On A Sea Of Seven-Segment Displays

February 23, 2023 by Dan Maloney 39 Comments

The amount of information the humble seven-segment display can convey is surprising. There are the ten numerals, dead-ringers or reasonable approximations for about half the alphabet, and even a few not-quite-canonical symbols. But when you put 12,288 segments to work, you get all that and much more.

Behold Sea of Segments, an art piece by [Will Gallia] that really pushes what’s possible with seven-segment displays. The piece, which looks about the size of a decent flat-panel TV, is composed of an 8×6 array of PCBs, each of which holds an 8×4 array of white LED seven-segment displays; each board also holds two TLC5920 LED drivers. [Will] designed the PCBs to tile horizontally and vertically, making it possible to take data either from the top or right side and output to the bottom or left. Power is distributed to the modules through a series of steel bus bars, which also provide structural support for the display. The whole thing lives in an enclosure with a smoked acrylic front panel, and hangs from a pair of steel cables that also provide power.

Under the hood, a PocketBeagle does all the heavy lifting of talking to the display and translating images onto the display. [Will] came up with an encoding scheme that gives about five bits of grayscale, and built a program to figure out which segments should be lit to create an image. The result is a smooth and convincing reproduction of videos of waves on a beach, which is where the project gets its name. Check out the results in the video below.

[Will] says he drew inspiration for this build from the DigitGrid by [Skot9000]. That was a great project too, but Sea of Segments takes the concept to another level.

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A round clock with a color-coded face, with its name "Pingo" across it, together with a 3D animated mouse

Pingo Is An Analog Clock That Uses Colors Instead Of Hands

February 20, 2023 by Robin Kearey 8 Comments

The purpose of a clock is to show the time, obviously. But if you’ve followed Hackaday for some time, you’ll know there are about a million different ways of achieving this. [illusionmanager] added yet another method in his Pingo Color Clock, which, as the name suggests, uses color as the main indicator.

The clock’s face is divided into three concentric circular zones. The zone at the center shows the hours, while the outer ring indicates the minutes. Both change their color such that they match the zone in between, which always shows a complete rainbow, at the desired location. In the picture above for example, the magenta inner circle matches the rainbow at the 10 o’clock position, while the yellow outer circle matches it at 10 minutes past the hour, meaning it’s currently 10:10.

The rainbow ring is also moving however, and by adjusting its rotation through time you can get some interesting effects. [illusionmanager] programmed it in such a way that the outer ring is always yellow during the day, purple at night, and red at sunrise and sunset. The overall brightness is also adjusted to a day/night schedule.

As complex as the clock’s appearance may be, inside it’s quite a simple design. Nine concentric circular LED strips are driven by an ESP8266, which retrieves the time and sunrise information through its WiFi connection. A piece of translucent white acrylic acts as a diffuser, while a 3D-printed enclosure holds everything together.

Encoding the time using different colors of light has been done before in various different ways, and while we haven’t seen Pingo in real life, we believe it should be somewhat easier to read than most of those examples. It might actually form a nice complement to a recent analog LED ring clock.

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A black chandelier that looks somewhat like a fern frond. It has four lights arranged roughly in a circle around the curly end and two clustered near the tail. It is mounted on a dark wood panel ceiling.

Put A Constellation In Your Dining Room

February 18, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 3 Comments

We love lamps here at Hackaday, especially if they imitate natural light sources. [Scott McIndoe] used his love of lamps to fashion a chandelier replicating his favorite constellation, the Southern Cross.

Starting with the Southern Cross’s four major stars and the pointers of Alpha and Beta Centauri, [McIndoe] sketched out a breaking wave form between the six stars to form the spine of this light source. By using smart bulbs for each of the six star positions, he was able to set a scene that replicates the color and relative brightness of each star for that extra astronomical touch.

The top and bottom of the chandelier is laser cut from 3 mm plywood and fitted together using glue and finger joints while the sides are a wood veneer. The entire piece was sanded and coated with a bit of filler before painting. Mounting is accomplished using three eye hooks mounted on the top side of the chandelier.

If you want more celestial lamps, check out [McIndoe]’s previously-featured analemma chandelier or this lithophane moon lamp.

LED Filament Lamp Is Subtle, Warm, And Elegant

February 18, 2023 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Hackers have loved LEDs from day one, back when they gave us little more than a dim spot of colored light in the darkness. These days, they’re big, bright, and beautiful, and can be used to create some exquisite lighting fixtures. This lamp build from [lonesoulsurfer] is a great example of that.

The build uses LED filaments, which have grown popular for the way they emulate old-fashioned Edison filament bulbs. The filaments consist of tiny LEDs all in a row, covered in flexible material to allow them to act like a filament. They’ll happily power up from just 3V, and deliver great brightness and lovely warm light.

[lonesoulsurfer] bent up an elegant oval-shaped frame for the lamp, using common brass tubing. In the middle of the are two lengths of white plastic tubing with the LEDs inside. The brass is painted black, with the LEDs providing two bright glowing lines on the arms of the oval. The base is then made out of wood and copper tubing, providing a pop of material contrast to the rest of the frame.

It’s an elegant build, and one you can readily recreate at home. If you do so with enough finesse, it will stunt on anything Ikea or (Australian) Kmart has put out in the last decade, in both material quality and uniqueness. We do love a good lamp build around these parts, after all. Video after the break.

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Homebrew Ball Drop Machine Rings In The New Year

February 10, 2023 by Lewin Day No comments

The New Year’s Ball Drop in New York City stems from an old English naval tradition. These days, it’s more of a celebratory thing, and [Jon Gonzalez] wanted to bring a bit of that joy to his own celebrations. Thus enter the Ball-Drop-O-Matic 3000.

The ball itself consists of two 3D printed halves assembled together with a linear bearing in the middle. It’s loaded up with a ton of addressable LEDs to give it plenty of flash, pomp, and circumstance as it rides down the flagpole. Animations are coded in to the K-1000C display controller using LEDEdit2014, an older piece of software which can turn Flash animations into commands to run WS2812B LED strips.

Lowering the ball is handled by a motorized winch. The winch is mounted at the base of the flagpole for aesthetic reasons, with the cable travelling up to the top of the pole, over a pulley, and back down to the ball. The descent speed is set to countdown the last minute of the year, with numbers animated on the ball itself.

The build was clearly a great addition to [Jon’s] New Years celebrations, even if it wasn’t quite finished until 9:35 PM on the big night. We’ve seen other fun ball drop builds before, too.

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LED Displays May Get Vertical Integration

February 7, 2023 by Al Williams 36 Comments

If you zoom into the screen you are reading this on, you’d see an extremely fine pattern of red, green, and blue emitters, probably LEDs of some kind. This somewhat limits the resolution you can obtain since you have to cram three LEDs into each screen pixel. Engineers at MIT, however, want to do it differently. By growing thin LED films and sandwiching them together, they can produce 4-micron-wide LEDs that produce the full range of color, with each color part of a vertical stack of LEDs.

To put things in perspective, a standard TV LED is at least 200 microns across. Mini LEDs measure upwards of 100 microns, and micro LEDs are the smallest of all. A key factor for displays is the pitch — the distance from the center of one pixel to the center of the next. For example, the 44mm version of the Apple Watch has a pitch of around 77 microns. A Samsung Galaxy 10 is just over 46 microns. This is important because it sets the minimum size for a high-resolution screen, especially if you are building large screens (such as when you build custom video walls (see the video below for more about that).

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Build A Circuit Sculpture-Style VU Meter For Music

February 2, 2023 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

One of the coolest things any sound system can have is some kind of musical visualization. Thumping level meters that pump with the volume are a great example, and were particularly popular in the 1980s. Now, you can build a rainbow set with great response, thanks to this guide from [Invexlab World].

The build relies on a very simple circuit that relies entirely on analog electronics in lieu of the usual digital signal analysis usually employed for the job. It’s a barebones design that’s assembled using a jig to create the attractive circuit sculpture structure. It uses simple colored LEDs, assembled in a line with red at the bottom, stepping through yellow and green, to blue and white at the top. A series of diodes is placed in series, with the sound level having to exceed the voltage drop of successive diodes to light the higher LEDs. It’s intended to be directly connected to a speaker’s audio input, and thus likely does load down the amplifier output slightly.

The result is an attractive rainbow VU meter display that would look great as a part of any old-school stereo setup. We can imagine it would look even better if it was cast in clear resin. Video after the break.

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