4″ Seven Segment Displays Make A Fine Scoreboard

September 12, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

[Blark] took a few parts and turned them into a simple scoreboard. The centerpiece of the build is a set of 4″ seven-segment displays. With those in hand it was just a matter of choosing a controller to feed them data, and developing a user interface.

He seems to have had some issues as he mentions having blown up two PIC chips while soldering. He transitioned to an ATtiny24 chip and everything seems to work quite well now. The user interface depends on two buttons, each increments the score for one half of the display and pushing both at once zeros the game score. The displays use shift registers to store data so they’re quite easy to control with AVR chips. Check out the demo video after the break.

The only problem here is that someone needs to be on the sidelines to increment the score. We’ve seen some more intricate designs that let you use a remote control or even a smart phone.

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More LED Madness!

September 12, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 5 Comments

So last week [Caleb] posted an article about hacking a floating LED ball. In response, here’s a couple simple LED hacks or repurposings that I’ve come up with recently.

LED Solar Glow Cube: If you’ve ever seen path lights lighting up people’s gardens or walkways you may have wondered what components they had in them and how they could be repurposed. As shown in this article, there’s not much too them other than a circuit board, rechargeable battery, and, of course, a solar panel. Combine this with some leftover foam with a hole in it, and you have the device pictured above. Really simple, but the results are pretty cool as seen in the video after the break.

LED Nunchucks: If you thought that wheel lights were only for actual wheels, than you haven’t seen these nunchucks built with some PVC pipe and acceleration-sensitive wheel lights. This may not be much of a “hack” in that they are quite easy to build, but the results are pretty neat, being fun to sling around or even for use in long-exposure photography. Check out the videos after the break of these nunchucks in action and of some LED light paintings that can be made with them. Continue reading “More LED Madness!” →

Full-color Video On A Spinning POV Display

September 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

Watching Big Buck Bunny on a spinning POV display is pretty impressive. Sure, the circular display area cuts off some of the picture, but otherwise it looks fantastic. This POV display is based on a Gumstix board. It runs embedded Linux which makes video playback rather easy. But translating each frame to the round display is another story.

The device is the result of a course project at Telecom ParisTech. [Félix], [Sylvain], and [Jérémy] used an FPGA to do the pixel mapping. This uses an encoder wheel (rather than a traditional hall effect sensor) to ascertain the blade’s position. The sensor that monitors the disc sends quadrature encoded pulses which result in 10-bit position data. The FPGA uses that data to calculate where each LED falls in its arc, then looks up the pixel color for that position. It’s not the largest POV display we’ve seen, but it certainly has the very best RGB resolution by far.

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Disco Planet, A Massive RGBW LED Array In A 6′ Globe

September 11, 2012 by Jesse Congdon 24 Comments

About half a year ago [John] over at Frank’s Kitchens came to me with an idea for a giant lighting project. He had this 6ft diameter aluminum frame globe rescued from the Philadelphia Theater Company and wanted it to be an interactive display of sorts. After a few discussions we got together and somehow managed to order 800 3 watt LEDs in red, green, blue, and white. We had a system that worked great on paper, and managed to get it built by Valentines day for a big show. It failed miserably and hardly even illuminated the LEDs. I, naturally, took this far too personally and set out for a complete redesign, looking in the direction of digitally addressable LED strips.

In addition to building a crazy turbo charged LED array I also spent a lot (a whole lot) of time coding a nice clean fully functioning RGB LED strip controller using an Arduino Pro Mini (5V 16 MHz), the MSGEQ7 audio frequency multiplexer (PDF) , and an IR remote. I plan on using this for other projects so the code can be easily reconfigured to use many different LED strips and a whole slew of IR remotes.

The schematic of the globe is here. The top half of that schematic be catered to other projects using a variety of pre-built LED strips. The pastebin with code is here, fastSPI_LED and IRRemote here and here. Some code jockeying was required to get IRRemote.h and FastSPI_LED to play nicely together, so check the code comments.

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It Was Only A Matter Of Time Before We Saw Nixie Modules For The Arduino

September 9, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 33 Comments

The Nixie tube, a neon-filled tube with a series of 10 cathodes shaped like numerals, is a classic display for any build wanting a unique, vintage, or steampunk aesthetic. We shouldn’t be surprised a factory in China is now turning out Arduino-compatable Nixie modules (English translation, but don’t get your hopes up), but there it is.

The modules are based on the QS30-1 Nixie tube capable of displaying the digits 0 through 9, and include an RGB LED behind the tube for some nice additional illumination. According to the manual, the modules themselves are based on a pair of 74HC595 shift registers, and are ‘stackable.’ By applying 12 volts to a pair of pins and connecting another 5 wires to an Arduino, it’s possible to drive as many of these Nixie modules as you’d like.

[Paul Craven] got his hands on a quartet of these modules and is planning on building a steampunk style alarm clock as a personal project. [Paul] was able to get the modules up and running fairly quickly, as seen after the break.

While they’re most certainly not the cheapest option, if you’re planning a build with Nixies, this probably is the easiest way to get a vintagey, steampunkey numerical display.

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Putting 300 Watts Of LEDs On An RC Plane

September 7, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

Being a member of the FPVlab forums, [HugeOne] is really in to strapping a video camera to RC airplanes and flying around by the seat of his pants. He’s also in to flying his plane at night. Combine these two interests, and you’ve got 300 watts of LEDs flying around at night, most likely causing a spike in UFO reports in [HugeOne]’s native Quebec.

The main issue with putting 16 CREE XM-L LEDs in such a confined space is the issue of heat; even though these LEDs are amazingly efficient, they still produce a good amount of heat. [HugeOne] solved this problem by soldering these LEDs to a piece of copper pipe and connecting two radiators to his plane for liquid cooling.

The result is a small, lightweight LED array capable of producing more than 20,000 lumens flying around the wilds of Quebec. This greatly improves [HugeOne]’s night flying ability (video after the break), and has surely annoyed the local police department with an increase in UFO reports.

Does anyone know how bright the nav and landing lights on single-engine passenger airplanes are?

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Building Your Own LED-based Home Lighting

September 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

We see LEDs used in all kinds of projects but rarely does someone build a home lighting system from scratch with them. [Paulo Oliveira] decided to give the idea a try, included a fading power supply for the LEDs which he built himself. Here you can see the installation at full brightness, but his controller also offers a single lower setting.

We saw [Sprite_TM] use an RGB LED strip to light up his living room. [Paulo] went with individual LED modules instead, all the same color. They are Cree XM-L power LEDs so some thought needs to be put into heat dissipation. All six are mounted along an aluminum strip which serves as the heat sink. They’re wired in series and powered by an old laptop power supply. A PIC 12F683 uses PWM to dim the string via a MOSFET.

The control system for the two brightness levels uses the wall switch. When turned on, the LEDs fade in to full brightness. If you turn the switch off and back on before they are all the way on, the dimmed setting takes over. This was complicated by the capacitance of the PSU but [Paulo] solved that by adding a power resistor.