Animated Holiday Wreath From A String Of LED Lights

December 23, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

[Dennis Adams’] wreath lights project looks pretty good. But he did some amazing coding to produce a whole set of interesting animated patterns that really seal the deal for the project. Don’t miss the video after the break where he shows off all of his hard work.

He started with a string individually addressable LEDs. These are the 12mm variety like what Adafruit sells (we’ve seen them popping up in a number of projects). To mount each pixel he tried a several different prototypes before settling on a ring that was 14″ in diameter. The design was laser cut from acrylic, with sets of staggered holes to host each ring of LEDs. The final touch was to add ping-pong balls to diffuse the light.

As we mentioned earlier, the light patterns really add the finishing touch to the project, but there is more functionality there too. [Dennis] rolled in the ability to monitor a Twitter feed with the wreath. When he gets a new tweet, a different animation will let him know about it.

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Adding Task Lighting Inside A Desk

December 21, 2012 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

storage-task-lighting

[Mahesh Venkitachalam] wanted to light up the dark recesses of his desk. What good is all that storage if you can’t see a darn thing in there? His solution was to add LED strips which turn on automatically when the door is opened.

The design is quite simple. A 2N2222 NPN transistor is responsible for connecting the ground rail of the LED strips mounted under each shelf. The base of that transistor is held high with a pull-up resistor. But a reed switch always connects the base to ground when the door is shut. Opening the door removes the magnet that keeps that reed switch closed. This allows current to flow from the pull-up to the base, connecting the ground rail to the LED strips and turning them on. You can see the video demo after the break.

One problem that we see with the design is that these are driven by a 9V battery. Over a long period of time that pull-up resistor will drain the cell. You can pick up a magnetic reed switch at the hardware or electronics store that is rated for 500 mA. If you can stay under that with the LED strips, and get one that is open when the magnet is present you will have zero power drain when the lights aren’t being used.

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Arduino Compatible Christmas Tree

December 21, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

tree

It wouldn’t be the holidays without an LED Christmas tree, and luckily [Danilo] brings the goods with an Arduiinofied LED Christmas tree (Italian, translation).

In the past week, we’ve seen LED Christmas trees of digital logic and a great freeform circuit version. Unlike these other builds [Danilo]’s LED tree uses a piece of protoboard masterfully cut into the shape of a Christmas tree. There’s no PCB for this build; just a lot of bare wires and a lot of patience.

Because [Danilo]’s tree makes use of the PWM pins on his Arduino, it was possible to connect his tree to the Arduino with a few 90 degree headers. This provides a great base for his tree and makes it possible to build a professional-looking enclosure for his project.

You can check out [Danilo]’s tree in action after the break.

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Sound Reactive Christmas Tree Makes Folks Happy

December 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

This non-traditional Christmas tree in Victoria, British Columbia is bringing people together this holiday season. It boasts over 800 lights that react to sound. You can see the pulsing and color changing that go along with some Tuba carols in the clip after the break.

The art installation was commissioned by the Downtown Victoria Business Association. A great big cherry tree was adorned with strings of individually addressable RGB LED Christmas lights. They are controlled by a system which calculates changes based on onset, energy and frequency analysis of sound picked up by multiple microphones. The effect is delightful and it’s not just musicians getting in on the fun. Passersby can’t seem to help themselves from yelling, clapping, and singing to make the tree sparkle.

Also included in the project is an interactive stop-motion animation film. It’s projected on the side of a building and invites viewers to send a text message to interact with it. A video of this is also found after the jump.

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O Christmas Tree Of Digital Logic

December 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 9 Comments

tree

[Chris] over at PyroElectro is getting into the swing of the holidays with a LED Christmas tree build. Unlike the other electrical Christmas trees we’ve seen this holiday season, [Chris] designed his tree entirely with digital logic – no microcontrollers included.

The tree [Chris] constructed on a piece of perf board is a beautiful spiral arrangement of 64 green LEDs.While we’re sure getting all the LEDs soldered to the right height, [Chris] makes it look so easy to create 3D structures with circuits.

The LEDs are driven with a set of eight shift registers, themselves clocked by either a predictable 555 timer chip or a pseudo-random pattern generated with a circuit built from a few hex inverters. By setting the tree to the sequential mode, a pair of lights travel slowly down the spiral of the Christmas tree. If set to random mode, an random number of LEDs light up and walk down the array of LEDs.

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Man Proposes To Girlfriend With An Arc Reactor

December 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

arc

Thinking long and hard about how to propose to his girlfriend, [Ed] hit upon a great idea: use an arc reactor as the ring box, with enough LED lights to outshine all but their love, and servos to present the ring and tug at the heartstrings.

[Ed] set about giving his now-fiancé from his arc reactor heart by building a simple circular arrangement of adafruit RGB LED strip and an Arduino. There are two modes for this arc reactor: a light up mode that simply looks awesome, and a ‘ring mode’ that uses two servos to open the front cover and bring the engagement ring into view.

After [Ed]’s fiancé said yes, the cover in the center of the arc reactor closes for its continued use as a desk ornament. You can check out [Ed]’s proposal contraption in action after the break.

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ATTannenbaum

December 17, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

attiny

It’s that special time of year again where the smell of baking cookies fill the house and shopping mall parking lots are filled with idiots and very angry people. [Kevin] thought it would be a good idea to build an LED Christmas tree and ended up building a great looking tree that’s also very simple.

In the video, the imgur album, and the github, [Kevin] shows us the simplest way to make a color-changing LED Christmas tree. The circuit uses LEDs to drop the voltage and to provide a nice glow around the base of the tree. After that, it’s just an ATtiny13 and some LEDs in a very nice freeform circuit.

Of course, if LED Christmas trees aren’t your thing, [hb94] over on reddit created an LED menorah. Pretty nifty he used an 8-position DIP switch for the circuit. Let’s just hope someone gave him a soldering iron for the last night of Hanukkah.