Unplayable Holophonor Replica Is Unplayable

August 22, 2013 by Marsh 31 Comments

holophonor

You won’t find all that many props or homemade replica builds here at Hackaday, but [Harrison Krix’s] work is second to none, and his Futurama Holophonor replica is worth drooling over. [Harrison] sourced an old (and apparently grimy) clarinet from a local thrift store, which he strips clean of its keys and attachments. The body itself receives some subtle modifications from the lathe and epoxy to plug some holes. Custom-spun plastic pieces complete the rest of the body, including the meticulously crafted bell which houses 54 LEDs.

[Harrison] also whips up a breakout board for a mini Arduino Pro with 4 fading and 4 blinking channels, and some custom power supply options for the Holophonor’s base: a scratch-built fiberglass AAA battery holder and optional AC adapter jack. As an added bonus, he’s fitted the Holophonor’s stand with a set of Robot Devil hands that hold it in place. The only video is an illumination test, but it sure is pretty. You can see it below! It looks perfect, but alas is unplayable which actually makes it even more authentic.

The Holophonor is the latest in a slew of work from Volpin Props. You probably remember [Harrison’s] first Daft Punk helmet from a few years back, or the second one that followed shortly after.

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One Pixel Video Game Rises From RGB Button Hardware

August 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys No comments

This project was completely component driven. [Christopher] and [Robert] wanted to try out buttons with an RGB backlight option. They found the one shown above, which looks fantastic. It should since it costs over twenty bucks in single units. What they came up with is a one pixel video game that works like a color matching version of Simon Says. The button will show you the target color for just a moment. The player then holds the button as it fades through colors. Releasing it at the right instant will produce a green flash, a wrong shade results in a red flash.

They went with an Arduino Mega for the project as that was within easy reach. A hunk of protoboard is used as a shield, it includes the button itself, connected through some current limiting resistors to the pins that drive the LED. There is also a tactile switch which actuates the AVR’s reset pin.

When trying to get the LED to fade through the full range of colors [Christopher] was hit with a common problem. Since our eyes don’t detect changes in low and high intensity light the same way, you can’t use linear changes in PWM and get a smooth result. He fixed this by using Gaussian curves to set the intensity levels.

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Soundball Bumps To Your Tunes

August 7, 2013 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

soundball-blinks-to-the-music

Meet soundball, a hobby electronics project when replaces a disco ball with one made of LEDs (translated) going every which way. This image shows the device before being injected into an enclosure. The final offering is a white project box with a hole in the top through which the diffuser covered blinky ball is supported.

The main board hosts a collection of the usual suspects: an ATmega328, an MSGEQ7 equalizer, a couple of TLC5940 LED drivers, and a footprint for a Bluetooth Shield. The equalizer chip provides [Cornelius] the audio analysis used to generate light patterns that go along with the music. But he can still control the lights manually with a button on the case or by connecting to it via Bluetooth.

Swap out the LED drivers for some solid state relays and you can blink your Christmas lights to the music.

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A Cold Cathode Audio Visualizer

August 7, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

Finally, cold cathode lights can be used for much more than illuminating the inside of your computer or making your whip look like it can hover. [James] discovered if he varied the voltage going into the inverter, only a certain amount of the tube would light up. Give a hacker an interesting observation and enough time, and eventually he’ll come up with something really cool. In this case, it’s a cold cathode audio visualizer, powered by fluorescent tubes doing unexpected things.

The build details are a little scant, but we were able to coax an imgur album of [James]’ build. He’s using these 20″ CCFL lights with the stock digital inverters replaced with TDK CCFL inverters.

The digital control of this build is provided by an Arduino Mega and a custom shield. We’re guessing the graphic EQ is provided by an MSGEQ7 chip, and the inverters themselves are powered through the Mega’s PWM pins. It’s a lot like an IN-9 Nixie graphic EQ, only much, much bigger. [James] is planning a larger version of this build, dubbed the Mega speKtrum and we can’t wait to see that build along with a proper writeup.

LED Strip Cape Drives Kilometers Worth Of LEDs

August 4, 2013 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

led-strip-cape

[Hudson] is looking to drive a lot of LEDs. A driver that effectively addresses kilometers worth of LED strips isn’t an easy thing to come by. So he’s in the process of designing his own BeagleBone Cape to do the work. Above you can see the board layout he’s working with. Notice the set of repeating red footprints in the center? Those are pads for 32 RS485 connectors!

Of course this is all in preparation for Burning Man where the mantra seems to be: he who has the most LEDs wins. Well, unless you’re the sort that likes to work with flames. But we digress. The scaling problem that [Hudson] is dealing with hinges around his desire not to include ridiculous numbers microcontrollers and the need to beef up the 3.3V logic levels of the BeagleBone to travel further on the data bus of the strips. By leveraging the RS485 protocol — which is designed to carry data over long distances — he can get away with a single processing unit by adding an RS485 translator at each remote strip connector. He plans to use the BeagleBone’s Programmable Realtime Units feature to address the eight drivers on the cape. But first he has to solve what looks like a doozy of a trace routing problem

Building A Blinky Infinity Mirror

July 23, 2013 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

This infinity mirror prototype is small enough to test out the theory before committing to the full project. And the full project that [Kevin] and [Edward] have in mind is a huge infinity portal that they will showcase at this year’s Alchemy festival.

It’s called an infinity mirror because it has the illusion of being much deeper than the physical enclosure. The trick is accomplished by placing two mirrors parallel to each other with a light source in between. One of the mirrors is two-way, letting a portion of the light pass through to the viewer rather than reflecting it.

The video demo of the prototype shows that it’s just a 2×4 wooden frame which holds both mirrors. In between is an LED string. The nice thing about the prototype is that adding a bit of tempered glass on top will make it an infinity bar top for the Hackerspace.

Another mirror trick you might incorporate in your own projects is adding an LED display behind the glass.

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PixelBrite Is An LED Wall/coffee Table Done Right

July 19, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

pixelbrite

The scope of this project is almost as jaw-dropping as the cost of the parts. [LeoneLabs] calls the project PixelBrite. It’s a highly-polished modular RGB LED panel system, and he’s not keeping it a secret. We think it’s reasonable to call the build documentation mammoth. If you’re a fan of fast-motion assembly videos he’s got you covered there as well.

It’s interesting to compare this build to some of the Daft Punk tables from years back. It shows how economies of scale in the hobby electronics industry have helped new and affordable products to emerge. For instance, this offering is a 10×10 grid which is outside of the normal 8 pixel wide orientation dictated by 8-bit microcontrollers. The reason for the change is that this doesn’t use a matrix built with point-to-point soldering. It uses a string of RGB pixels (WS2801).

The enclosure is also a thing of beauty. The dividers that make up each cell are laser cut foam board. This makes the joints very tight to prevent light from leaking into the next cell. The housing is acrylic held in place by an aluminum rail system. Need more than one panel? No problem, a single connector chains one panel to the next. But we did mentioned the cost of materials. Unassembled you can expect to drop over five hundred bones for the pleasure of seeing this thing blink.

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