Is An LED Bow Tie Ironic Or Awesome?

July 4, 2013 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

led-bowtie

We’re not exactly trend setters when it comes to wardrobe. And so the recent revival of the bow tie as an accepted dress item confounds us. We’re even more confused by [Arichter’s] LED bow tie. Sure, the hobby electronics part of it is a win… but when it comes to fashion is he making fun of the bow tie wearers, or setting a new standard?

The tie is made of three PCBs, which lets the wings sit on a bit different plane than the center. He populated the boards with about 100 RGB LED modules which he desoldered from a couple of meters of LED strip. They draw a lot of juice and to supply that he uses a boost converter. A standard Arduino UNO board controls the lights.

If you’re still sold on the bow tie form factor we’d like to direct your attention to this long-tie version. It doesn’t just show patterns, but plays a wicked game of Tetris with you as the game board.

[via Reddit]

Super-precise Light Painting From A Delta Robot

July 3, 2013 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

delta-robot-light-painting

The points of those geometric shapes line up perfectly thanks to the delta robot arm controlling the light source. The source is a simple LED that can be switched on and off as it moves. A camera is set up in a dark room to keep the shutter open while the arm moves. We’re assuming that all of the light for the stationary objects in this image comes from the LED as well.

[Sick Sad] built the delta bot for just for this purpose. Check out the video below to see, and perhaps more importantly hear, the thing in motion. Seriously, the whine of the stepper motors is pretty awesome on this one.

The delta concept uses a central head on three arms angled down from above. If the LED is also pointed down it won’t light up the hardware and that’s why it doesn’t show up in the image. We’ve seen similar accuracy when using this style of machine for 3D printing. But if you don’t want to build a complicated machine you can try this out with a simple string plotter.

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Dimming LED Bulbs Designed To Replace Halogen Lamps

June 28, 2013 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

dimming-led-halogen-replacements Halogen bulbs put out a lot of focused light but they do it at the expense of burning up a lot of Watts and generating a lot of heat. The cost for an LED replacement like the one seen disassembled above has come down quite a bit. This drove [Jonathan Foote] to purchase several units and he just couldn’t resist tearing them apart to try out a couple of hacks.

The one we find most interesting is a PWM based dimming hack he pulled off with an Arduino board and a FET. The bulbs are designed to be dimmable through the 12V supply that feeds the light fixture. But the relationship of dimmer position to light level is not linear and [Jonathan] figured he could do better. His solution is to add a FET in parallel with the LEDs. When activated it basically shunts the current around the diodes, resulting in a dimming. The video below shows this in action. We wonder if the flashing is a camera artifact or if you pick that up with your eye as well?

You may also be interested to read his post on Gelling the LED bulbs. Gels are colored filters for lights (or camera lenses). He cuts his preferred color down to size and inserts it between the LEDs and the lenses.

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WALL-O-TRON, The Interactive Rock Climbing Wall

June 26, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

Last April, hackerspaces around the country received a gift from RedBull for their creation challenge. The hackerspace teams were charged with creating, ‘something with LEDs’ and let loose in their workshop for a chance to win a trip to NYC and build some cool stuff. Of course, RedBull couldn’t bring all the teams to the big apple and a few incredible projects were left by the wayside in their home hackerspace.

One such project was the WALL-O-TRON from Team Rabbit-Hole and home base for the Tymkrs. It’s a huge wall embedded with LEDs that turn an ordinary rock climbing wall into a game called WallSweeper – climb a path to the illuminated hold, but don’t touch the ‘hot rock’ or your game is over.

The hand holds are illuminated by over 300 of LEDs connected to a Linux PC. The sign above the wall is controlled by RedBull’s TurBULL Encabulator, and the giant ‘WALL-O-TRON’ letters are huge pieces of foam with five meters of RGB LEDs embedded inside.

A great project with the possibility of being upgraded in the future with more games. Perfect for the rock climbing playground it’s situated in.

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LED Tie Plays Tetris

June 25, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

tetris

[Bill] has been working with a gaggle of 8th graders this summer at a STEM camp, impressing them with his geeky attire such as an 8-bit and PCB ties, and an LED illuminated lab coat. The adolescent tinkerers asked him what he would be wearing on the last day. Not wanting to let the kids down, he whipped up an LED Tetris tie in an evening.

The Tetris board is a 20 x 4 grid of WS2811 based RGB LED strips, controlled by a Digispark dev board. Structurally, the tie is just two bits of card stock with the electronic bits sandwiched in between. and taped to a cheap clip-on. In the video below, the tie doesn’t have any sort of input to control the movement and rotation of blocks. [Bill] plans to update his tie with some rudimentary AI so it can play itself.

All the code is over on [Bill]’s git. It’s still a work in progress, but from the STEM student’s reaction, there’s a lot of potential in this tie.

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Lots Of Seven Segment Displays With A Single ATtiny

June 24, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

7seg

These days they’ve been replaced with character LCD displays or even brightly colored graphical displays, but if you’re trying to display data on one of your projects, there’s nothing like the classic red glow of a red seven segment display. [five volts] got his hands on a few ancient segmented displays, but controlling even one took up more microcontroller pins than he was ready to spare. The solution to this problem was to use a shift register and control multiple segment displays with an 8 pin microcontroller.

[volts] is using an ATtiny13 to control six seven segment displays. Each display is mounted on a hand-etched board, with a shift register and a handful of resistors soldered to the back. By having the microcontroller shift bits down the line, [volts] created an extremely easy to interface 6-digit segment display, and the entire device can be expanded even more.

The board files and schematics are available on [volt]’s project page. A great project if you’re just starting out to etch your own boards.

Adding RGB Backlight To Arcade Buttons

June 23, 2013 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

These arcade buttons started out as illuminated buttons. But they were bulb-based which only allowed for one color. [Jon] and his friends at the Leeds Hackspace wanted to find a way to retro fit them with RGB LEDs, without changing the buttons themselves. The hack lets them replace the bulb with an addressable circuit board. The really interesting thing about it is that there is no separate interface for addressing. The communications happen on the voltage bus itself.

After deciding to include a microcontroller inside the button they built a test version using some protoboard to see if it would fit. Indeed there was enough room and the proof-of-concept led to the factory spun board which you see above. It has pads for two of the four LED module feet on either side, with the opposite end of the board fitting into the bulb receptacle. The voltage line is pulsed to send commands to the microcontroller. We’re interested in finding out exactly how that works but we’ll have to dig through the code before unlocking the secret.

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