Halloween Light Show Gets An Upgrade

October 22, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 6 Comments

This is [Dave]’s second year of putting on a Halloween light show (cache), and his latest production has received some upgrades over last year’s Christmas show. He’s switched from Christmas style bulb lights to high brightness LEDs, and upgraded to 48 channels of control.

The controllers are from Light-O-Rama, and each provides 16 output channels. They communicate over RS-485; the same type of network used for controlling professional theater lights with the DMX512 protocol. The whole thing is powered by a 20 A DC supply from some Chinese retailer.

[Dave]’s show features light up pumpkins, tombstones, and faces mounted on his house. The lights are coordinated to a list of songs that he plays over an FM transmitter, allowing for cars to tune into the music that’s synced up with the lights.

If you happen to be in Estacada, OR, you might want to head over to [Dave]’s and check out the show in person. Otherwise, there’s two videos of the light show after the break.

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4096 LEDs Means The Biggest LED Cube Ever

October 21, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 60 Comments

Adaptive Computing, a cloud management and high performance computing outfit in Utah, needed something really cool to bring to their trade shows. Something that makes order out of chaos, and demonstrates their attention to detail in the midst of miles of wiring. They decided building the largest non-commercial LED cube would be a good project, and thus the 16x16x16 All Spark Cube was born.

The All Spark Cube was constructed using 10 mm RGB LEDs wired together with three-foot lengths of 16 ga pre-tinned copper wire. In this video, [Kevin] shows off the process of constructing a single row; first the LEDs are placed in a jig, the leads are bent down, and a bus wire is soldered to 16 individual anodes per row.

The hardware for the build uses 16 Arduino Megas with a custom-made shield powering a 16×16 LED grid. The custom shields provide the 24V for the LEDs, 5V for the ‘duino, The Arduino boards communicate to each other through an RS485 connection, and the entire cube is connected to a computer through an RS232 serial connection.

The software is, admittedly, still a little janky. [Spencer] and [Thomas], the Adaptive Computing volunteers that are working on the control system, are still having a few problems getting logos and animations to display. They have managed to create a control app to draw individual pixels, as seen after the break.

Not bad for nearly a mile of wire and a summer’s worth of work, huh?

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Mirage 2.0 Lights Up The Desert With 4,024 LEDs

October 15, 2012 by Jesse Congdon 17 Comments

Registering a mutant vehicle at the Burning Man Department of Mutant Vehicles (DMV) is rough. To be allowed to operate at night, wacky rolling creations have to have a certain degree of lighting presence. This keeps vehicles from blending into the scenery. Unfortunately Mirage 1.0 was built specifically with this in mind, using reflective surfaces to turn a van into a semi-invisible shiny slab. Not even EL wire, an illuminated dance floor, and spot lights could placate the DMV. The solution? Wrap the entire friggen vehicle in a netting of 4,000 LEDs! Take that officials!

Most of the hardware is Phillips display stuff, digital LED fixture controllers are used to interpret HDMI data and then pipe out color data to addressed chains. All this mapping and addressing means that the entire setup functions like a 168×24 pixel monitor. Split chains of LEDs also happen to allow the crew to operate the doors and get in and out of the vehicle.

The underlying car was built on the same sort of principal that hid the wheels of Skywalker’s landspeeder, only in this case the idea was to cover an entire car with mylar and mirror. An interesting side effect of this mirror wrapping is that a sheen of desert dust helps reflect the ambient LED light quite well, blurring pixel colors together. It sort of makes us wonder about picking up a bucket of Mylar for some of our spaced out displays.

The Mirage crew has plans for next year, and have videos of several ideas on the site (portions of the test videos are NSFW). Check out the video of Mirage 2.0 in action after the jump! Thanks [erland]!

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LED Matrix Pendants

October 12, 2012 by Mike Szczys 35 Comments

If you want to mess around with some microcontrollers but don’t really have a purpose in mind this project is perfect for you. It’s cheap, easy to assemble, and there’s blinking LEDs! [TigerUp] shows us how he put together some LED matrix pendants using just five components.

He calls the project Tiny Matrix, which is fitting as the pendant outline is barely 0.5″ by 0.7″. On the back an ATtiny2313 chip has been soldered directly to the legs of the LED display. They just happen to line up with I/O pins on the chip which makes for super simple soldering. Power comes from a coin-cell which is connected to the pendant by a red and black wire which make up the necklace for the device. The last two components not yet mentioned are a momentary push switch for changing modes, and a pull-up resistor on the reset pin. The bill of materials rings in at $4 and his firmware offers up nine different modes as you can see in the clip after the break.

[TigerUp] was inspired by this 8×8 matrix project.

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LED Wand Brings Ergonomics To Light Painting

October 9, 2012 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

Quit struggling with hastily patched together electronics for your light painting images. Follow [Madox’s] example and build a light painting wand designed with your hand in mind.

You wield it much like a sword, but the only damage it does is to the long-exposure camera pointed its way. The RGB LED strip is controlled by the guts of a tiny little wireless router, a TP-Link TL-WR703N. This lets [Madox] connect using an Android device to upload different images. It also lets you tweak the settings like adjusting the timing between columns to match your exposure settings. The custom handle design provides a home and mounting plan for everything involved. It was 3D printed at the Sydney Hackerspace.

This isn’t the first light painting device running Linux. We’ve actually seen the Raspberry Pi used in much the same way but that final project involved using an entire recumbent tricycle to move the colored lights.

Flashing LEDs Protect Livestock From Lion Attacks

October 6, 2012 by Ryan Fitzpatrick 50 Comments

When we think of defense against lion attacks, the first thought is usually guns. Lots and lots of guns. [Richard Turere], a 13 year old Kenyan tinkerer with neither books nor any technical education, has come up with something entirely different – He’s keeping the lions at bay with a solar powered system of flashing LEDs. Yup. Flashing LEDs.

Since he and his family live next to Nairobi National Park, lion attacks are an ever present danger. The only defense systems available were far too expensive for his family to afford, so he decided to build his own. He utilized the basic resources he had readily available: LED bulbs removed from broken flashlights, some switches, an old car battery, wire, and a solar panel that also operates his family’s TV.

The results speak for themselves. His family has had no lion attacks in over two years, and at least five of his neighbors believe in the system enough to have had him install it on their fences too. With the cost for this set up at less than ten dollars, and all the parts being readily available, this rather basic electrical system is an amazing breakthrough for the Kenyan pastoralists.

We look forward to seeing more of [Richard’s] inventions. Way to go!

LED Cyber Eyes; More Nerdy Than Just Taping Your Glasses

October 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Regular glasses are okay, but these light up and respond to your movement. [Dr. Iguana] is at it again, designing a very interestingly shaped PCB to augment your visual augmentation devices.

The circuit board has two thin curving wings which conform to the shape of a pair of glasses. In the middle there’s a larger area that holds most of the components but it’s still smaller than a common coin cell battery that powers the device. Over each eye there are a half dozen red LEDs which are driven by a PIC 12F1840. It can flash a bunch of patterns the but the interactivity is the real gem of the project. The doctor included an MMA8450 3-axis accelerometer. As you can see in the clip after the break, shaking your head this way and that will be reflected in the pattern of lights.

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