Pumpkin Tetris Inspired By Our Own LED Jack-o-lantern

October 29, 2012 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

The kids (or maybe their parents) are going to be lined up at [Nathan’s] front porch to get their turn at playing pumpkin Tetris. That’s right, he built a game of Tetris into a real pumpkin. We thought this looked quite familiar when we first saw it and indeed he was inspired by our own LED Matrix Pumpkin from two Halloweens ago. We love seeing derivative works and [Nathan] definitely make few great improvements to the process.

The matrix itself was wired in very much the same way we used, but he added an additional 58 LEDs to nearly double the size of the display. He used a paper grid and power drill to make room for the holes, but improved the visibility of the lights by sculpting square pixels in the skin of the fruit. But how does one control the game? The stem of the pumpkin is actually a joystick. One of the most innovative parts of the physical build was to use drywall anchors on the inside to mount the joystick hardware.

Don’t miss a demo video after the jump.

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Halloween Props: A Spooky Mirror

October 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This mirror will spook your guests with a variety of static and animated images. It includes a proximity sensor so the images will not appear until someone comes close enough to see themselves in the looking glass.

The electronic parts are quite easy to put together. There is a 32×32 RGB LED matrix mounted on the back of the mirror. It is driven by an IOIO board with some custom firmware written by [Ytai], the creator of that board who happens to live next door to [Alinke]. Where this starts to get interesting is when [Alinke] was working on the mirror to make the LEDs visible from the front. He used a razor knife to put hundreds of scratches in the varnish on the back. This lets just enough light through to see the LEDs, but keeps the mirrored surface reflective. See for yourself in the clip after the break.

The images are fed to the IOIO board by an Android device. We think this could have a lot of use after Halloween as a weather display or news ticker. Perhaps you could even feed it from your diy Android thermostat.

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Graphing The Efficiencies Of LED Light Strips

October 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

After adding a few LED light strips above his desk, [Bogdan] was impressed with the results. They’re bright, look awesome, and exude a hacker aesthetic. Wanting to expand his LED strip installation, [Bogdan] decided to see if these inexpensive LED strips were actually less expensive in the long run than regular incandescent bulbs. The results were surprising, and we’ve got to give [Bogdan] a hand for his testing methodology.

[Bogdan]’s test rig consists of a 15 cm piece of the LED strip left over from his previous installation. A Taos TSL2550 ambient light sensor is installed in a light-proof box along with the LED strip, and an AVR microcontroller writes the light level from the sensor and an ADC count (to get the current draw) of the rig every 6 hours.

After 700 hours, [Bogdan]’s testing rig shows some surprising results. The light level has decreased about 12%, meaning the efficiency of his LED strip is decreasing. As for projecting when his LEDs will reach the end of their useful life, [Bogdan] predicts after 2200 hours (about 3 months), the LED strip will have dropped to 70% of their original brightness.

Comparing his LED strip against traditional incandescent bulbs – including the price paid for the LED strip, the cost of powering both the bulb and the strip, the cost of the power supply, and the time involved in changing out a LED strip, [Bogdan] calculates it will take 2800 hours before cheap LEDs are a cost-effective replacement for bulbs. With a useful life 600 hours less than that, [Bogdan] figures replacing your workshop lighting with LED strips – inexpensive though they are – isn’t an efficient way to spend money.

Of course with any study in the efficiency of new technology there are bound to be some conflating factors. We’re thinking [Bogdan] did a pretty good job at gauging the efficiency of LED strips here, but we would like to see some data from some more expensive and hopefully more efficient LED strips.

TinyMatrix Derivative Uses PIC Instead Of AVR

October 22, 2012 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

[Stu] has a teenage niece whose birthday is coming up and he wanted to give her something unique as a gift. He’s working on an LED matrix pendant that can display pixel graphics, play animations, and scroll messages.

He began the work after drawing inspiration from the TinyMatrix project. That clever design uses a DIP AVR chip soldered directly to the legs of a 5×7 LED matrix. It was powered by a coin cell with the power and ground wires acting as the necklace for the pendant. [Stu] is more comfortable developing using PIC chips, so he based his project on a 16F88. It will not run from a 3V source so he’s got a few issued to work out before the final design is finished.

One thing that’s quite interesting is his side project. After growing weary of hand coding the arrays for each frame of an animation he wrote a GUI in C# that let him design the image and output the code with a few clicks of the mouse.

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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