Tie Tack Sends Morse Code Seasons Greetings

January 3, 2013 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

morse-code-tie-tack

For [Davide Gironi] made a holiday tie tack this year. It’s not made to look like Santa Claus, Frosty, or a Christmas tree. He simply wishes you a Merry Christmas (‘Buon Natale’ in Italian) by flashing the message in Morse code.

Two LEDs have been added to a plain tie tack. It is tethered to the logic circuitry that provides power and drives the red and blue lights accordingly. As you can see in the video after the break, red signifies the end of a letter, and long or short blue flashes correspond to dashes or dots. This doesn’t require much horsepower so he’s gone with an 8-pin ATtiny13 microcontroller (you might be able to find one of these in a light bulb if you look hard enough). The rest of the equipment includes a few resistors, a push button, and a coin cell for power. [Davide] uses a byte-packing technique he learned from a different project to store each letter as an 8-bit packet which means there’s plenty of room to store your message in the chip’s memory.

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Color Changing Bag Matches Clothing Color, Tells You What’s Inside

January 2, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

color-changing-shoulder-bag

Adding some lights to your everyday items will certainly give you a style leaning toward the world of Blade Runner. But if you can add functionality to control the blinky components you’ve actually got something. A great example of this is [Kathryn McElroy’s] Chameleon Bag. It’s a shoulder bag with a light-up flap. It can color match your clothing, but she also built some features that will let you know what is inside of the bag.

The project started by using a cardboard template in the size and shape of the bag’s flap. After adding an Arduino to control the LEDs and an RFID reader for an interactive element she sewed a replacement flap that also acts as a diffuser. In the video after the break she demonstrates matching the color of her scarf by reading a tag sewn in the end of it. She then starts loading up all the stuff needed for a day away from home. As the keys, phone, and computer are placed in the bag their tags are read, resulting in different combinations of color. Once everything she needs is inside, the flap turns green and she heads out the door.

This will go great with your illuminated umbrella.

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Three Conceptual Approaches To Driving A WS2811 LED Pixel

January 2, 2013 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[Cunning_Fellow] published a post with three proof-of-concept approaches to driving a WS2811 LED pixel. We looked at a project early in December that used an AVR microcontroller to drive the RGB package. [Cunning_Fellow] saw this, and even though he doesn’t have any of these parts on hand he still spent the time hammering out ways to overcome the timing issues involved with address the device. His motto is “put up or shut up” when it comes to criticizing projects featured on Hackaday. We love seeing someone pick up an idea and run with it.

The approach in all three cases aims to conserve clock cycles when timing the communications. This leaves the developer as many cycles as possible to perform other tasks than simply telling the lights what to do. One approach is an assembly routine that is just a shade slower but groups all 14 free cycles into one block. The next looks at using external 7400 series hardware. The final technique is good old-fashioned bit banging.

[Photo Credit]

A Concrete Table With A Little Blinky Built In

December 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

concrete-table-with-led-inlay

Members of the Warp Zone hackerspace wanted a coffee table that was beyond ordinary. They ended up pouring a concrete base for the glass top (translated). There were several things to address during the design. First off, they wanted to integrate LEDs in the concrete sides. Some consideration had to be made for portability as concrete is very heavy. The final piece of the puzzle was deciding what kind of hardware to place beneath the frosted glass.

The legs were designed with a large cut-out area to keep them as light weight as possible. The cross piece has a set of voids spelling out the name of the hackerspace with some green LEDs. This was accomplished by placing foam cut-outs of each letter in the forms before for concrete was poured. They sealed around each letter with silicone, but still had some seepage most likely caused when jostling the form to help remove air bubbles. Straws were placed in the foam to allow a cable pass through for the electronics. After everything was in place they filled the voids with hot glue to act as a diffuser.

There aren’t a lot of details about the RGB LEDs under the frosted glass. But you can see the light show they produce in the clip after the break.

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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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