Cast Acrylic And Wood LED Light

July 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

LED-ring-light

The design for this LED ring lamp started off as a cross-section sketch. [Alex Jalland] envisioned a core that holds the parts and hides the circuitry, with two halves of a clear doughnut diffusing the light and covering everything up.

For the core itself he headed over to the lathe and turned a piece out of ash. He tooled the profile into one side, flipped it around to form the other, and finally cut the center out to form a ring. This may sound like a lot of work, but it pales in comparison to what went into the diffusers.

He cast the parts out of polyurethane resin. This required a mold which he made from scratch. The process used many materials, including a vacuum forming machine, a latex slug, and plaster to keep the thin mold from deforming when filled with resin.

The lamp provides a lot of light. But with this much work put into the enclosure we’d suggest going the extra mile to make it an Equinox Clock clone.

Make Your Own Electronic Children’s Toys

July 17, 2013 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

diy-childrens-toys

[Miria Grunick’s] ~~son~~ nephew is two years old. If you’ve ever looked at that age range in the toy aisle we sure you’ve noticed that there’s a mountain of cheap electronic stuff for sale. Manufactures are cramming LEDs and noise makers into just about all kids stuff these days. But [Miria] thought why not just make him something myself? She calls this the Blinky Box. It’s an acrylic enclosure stuffed with pretty LEDs that is controlled with a few buttons.

It’s driven by a Teensy 3 board which monitors a half dozen colorful buttons, a mode selector on the side, and an on/off switch. The device is powered by a Lithium battery that recharges via USB. And of course there’s a strip of individually addressable RGB LEDs inside.

The demo shows that one mode allows you to press a button color and have the LEDs change to it. But there are other features like fade and scroll. She also mentions that since it can be reprogrammed the toy can grow with hime. Maybe it’ll be a Simon Says game. But eventually she hopes he’ll use it to learn the basics of programming for himself.

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Fun With LED Matrix And Mouse

July 15, 2013 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

fun-with-LED-matrix-and-mouse

[Brad] just acquired a 32×32 RGB LED matrix and he jumped right into the deep end with his first project. To try out his skills on the device he used an Arduino to drive a slew of pixels with bouncing-ball physics.

The demo starts off with a hail storm of multi-colored falling pixels. In the center of the storm is the cursor, which he controls with a PS2 mouse. That happens to be a ball mouse which makes sense as we don’t remember having seen any optical mice as of late that weren’t USB. The PS2 protocol is easy to read using a microcontroller; more about that in [Brad’s] project write up.

By holding down the left mouse button he can draw persistent pixels on the screen. The falling balls then interact by bouncing off of the obstacles. The image above shows a frame on three sides of the screen which has trapped the pixels near the bottom. He can also erase pixels, which has the effect of draining the trapped balls like a hole in a bucket of water. Neat!

Bouncing ball physics are fun to experiment with. Here’s one being driven by an analog computer.

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A Love Note In 14 Segments

July 14, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

[Terry] wanted to come up with a little electronics project for his kids, and also came up with something to keep the wife happy. It’s an adorable 14-segment love letter, pieced together with some leftover LED displays and a bit of solder.

There isn’t a microcontroller anywhere to be seen in this project – all the illuminated segments are tied to a switch, and aside from a few resistors there isn’t much to this circuit. The simplicity means it’s a great way for [Terry] to get his kids involved in electronics.

If you’re wondering why [Terry] didn’t throw multiple Arduinos, shift registers, or LED drivers into the build, consider this: sometimes segment displays can be static. The time circuit prop from Back to the Future (but not this modern recreation) was wired up in a similar manner, as only a few specific dates needed to be displayed. Either way, we’re thinking good on [Terry] for introducing his kids to a soldering iron and doing something special for his lady friend.

Computer Monitor Ambilight Clone Shows Remarkable Performance

July 13, 2013 by Mike Szczys 54 Comments

ambilight-project-discreet-led-boards

Check out this fantastic Ambilight clone for a computer monitor which [Brafilus] has been working on for a few years. It’s actually the third revision and watching the demo video below left our jaws agape.

Details are only available as comments on the YouTube page. But he’s given us just enough to be satisfied. His self-etched board hosts a PIC 18F14K50 microcontroller. It is talking to each of the 28 LED pixels which themselves live on tiny hunks of diy PCB as well. He wrote his own PC software in C# to capture the colors around the edges of the screen. He also worked hard to ensure there are plenty of tweaks available for true color matching between the monitor and what your eye sees bouncing off of the wall.

If you’re looking for something like this on your television set go back a couple of days and check out that standalone unit.

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Web Based Automation Courtesy Of Raspberry Pi

July 12, 2013 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

web-based-automation-via-rpi

This project is a great example of the Raspberry Pi’s ability to eclipse Arduino when it comes to interaction. [Fall Deaf] mentions that he used to use an Arduino board with an Ethernet shield to add extensible interactivity to his project. But this one, which is a home automation lamp project, uses a Raspberry Pi instead. The concepts end up being very similar. But the cost of the hardware is less and the coding work is arguably orders of magnitude easier.

Don’t get us wrong, the hardware is fundamentally different. When you move from Arduino to RPi you lose some I/O pins and the low level control of them isn’t quite as straight-forward. But you also don’t have to program the thing in C. The Linux kernel handles the low level control which means you can write your scripts using Python. Because Python is an interpreted language the testing and debugging is much faster — no need to flash new code, just run the script again.

This project used the RPi GPIO to drive a strip of LEDs which use the WS2801 protocol. The board includes a NIC which makes it a snap to use as a web server. The smart phone controls seen above are served up from the Pi using jQuery. Right now there’s a cord running out of the lamp. But there should be plenty of room to use a screw-in outlet adapter and to hide the RPi and its PSU inside.

The board still has enough juice to drive other automation features too, like acting as a web radio server.

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LED Strip Pong As An Arduino Shield

July 6, 2013 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

led-pong-strip

[Schuyler Sowa] has been hard at work on his own version of LED strip Pong. We’d say his work has really paid off. The game is robust and full of features.

Unlike the original Pong video game LED pong only has one axis on which the ball travels. The ball will bounce back if the button at the end of the strip is pressed when either of the last two LED pixels are illuminated. To add in a difficulty adjustment [Schuyler] included a poteniometer which alters the speed.

The game board is one meter of LED strip with individually addressable pixels. It cost a whopping $28 and was the second kind he tried after having trouble with the WS2801 based version (which often come as strings of lights). An Arduino board controls the game, with a shield made from protoboard to connect the components. In addition to the two user buttons — which were hacked out of a computer keyboard — you’ll notice a pair of seven segment displays acting as a scoreboard and an HD44780 character LCD rounding out the user interface.

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