Blinkenwall Controlled By A C64

July 23, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

Looking for a dual monitor setup for your Commodore 64? Look no further than the C64 controlled Blinkenwall put together over at Metalab.

The Blinkenwall is 45 glass blocks serving as a partition between the main room and the library over at Metalab in Vienna. Previously, the Blinkenwall was illuminated by 45 ShiftBrite RGB LED boards controlled by an Arduino connected to a Fonera router over a serial port. The Metalab guys have an awesome web interface that allows them (and you) to compose 45-pixel animations and play them on the Blinkenwall.

The new hardware update includes a Commodore 64, a Final Cartridge III, and the ever popular Commodore tape drive. now, instead of sending animation patterns over the Internet to an Arduino, the folks at Metalab can write their animations as 6510 assembly and save it on a cassette.

Yes, this may be a bit of an anachronism, but think of the possibilities: Prince of Persia on a 9×5 display, or just a light show to go along with some SID tunes. You can check out the video after the break.

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Fabricating Headlights For An F250

July 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

The amount of time that is going into these custom headlights is just staggering. [Mcole254] is working on his brother’s truck, replacing the stock headlights with High-Intensity Discharge (HID) lamps and rolling some nice LED features into the mix while he’s at it.

The build starts by removing and disassembling the stock headlight assembly. In order to get the enclosure apart he heated it in the oven until the glue was softened and the parts could be pried apart. The goal is to replace the reflectors with an assembly that suits the new lamps and LEDs. Above you can see the white pieces which were vacuum formed from a mold that [Mcole254] made from wood and PVC. He tried several iterations using his home-made vacuum former but couldn’t get the definition he really wanted. The most recent posts from him show some massive 3D printed parts that will be used instead.

While inside he added a line of amber LEDs for the turn signal. You can seem them mounted along the silver strip between the upper and lower reflectors. A demo of those super bright additions is embedded after the break.

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BlinkM Gets Upgraded To A USB Mass-market Device

July 11, 2012 by Mike Szczys 31 Comments

[TodBot] has a new piece of hardware on the way up. His Blink(1) is currently about 50% funded on Kickstarter. It’s a USB nub that has an RGB LED inside of it. When plugged into a computer it can be used as a status indicator. At first that sounds like a let down, but his marketing is fantastic as the myriad of uses really caught our attention. If you’re on the road you can use it to report back your server statistic. Plug one into each rack-mounted servers for quick visual indication of which one has crashed. Or find your own use.

You probably remember [TodBot] as the creator of the BlinkM. Recently he was calling it the world’s smallest Arduino. Well this Blink(1) is being marketed as Arduino programmable as well. The board size is about the same, and both have an RGB LED module. The difference is that the BlinkM had an ATtiny85 and needed a serial converter to program it. This has a USB plug so we’d bet he’s swapped the tiny for an ATmega8u2 or something from the same family.

Don’t think one blinky LED is going to cut it? For folks that just need more resolution there are other hardware options out there. For instance, this project gives you a wireless 8×8 RGB led display to use as an indicator.

Taking A Moon Light From Grayscale To Full Color

July 6, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

[Terry Miller] picked up a moon light on the cheap. All it does is light up some white LEDs to simulate moon phases after sensing nightfall via an LDR. He figured he could do better and set out to replace the electronics with a more colorful offering.

He chose to use an ATmega328 because he already had it on hand. The chip drives a series of RGB LEDs in a multiplex arrangement. To protect the I/O pins (and drive the LEDs at their target current) he is using a set of high and low side MOSFETs. Rather than rely on the light sensor to switch on the lamp he decided to add an IR receiver. In the video after the break you can see that this lets him cycle through colors and effects, in addition to switching the lamp on and off with a remote control.

With the enclosure put back together he is still able to reprogram the chip thanks to a serial header included in the design. The device is battery operated and the life estimates are included in his write-up.

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Levitating Lightbulb Does It All With No Wires

July 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 58 Comments

It would be really fun to do an entire hallway of these levitating wireless lights. This a project on which [Chris Rieger] has been working for about six months. It uses magnetic levitation and wireless power transfer to create a really neat LED oddity.

Levitation is managed by a permanent magnet on the light assembly and an electromagnetic coil hidden on the other side of the top panel for the enclosure. That coil uses 300 meters of 20 AWG wire. A hall effect sensor is used to provide feedback on the location of the light unit, allowing the current going to the coil to be adjusted in order to keep the light unit stationary. When working correctly this draws about 0.25A at 12V.

Wireless power transfer is facilitated by a single large hoop of wire driven with alternating current at 1 MHz. This part of the system pulls 0.5A at 12V, bringing the whole of the consumption in at around 9 Watts. Not too bad. Check out [Chris’] demo video embedded after the break.

A similar method of coupling levitation with power transfer was used to make this floating globe rotate.

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Lightsaber Lets You Pick Just About Any ‘blade’ Color

July 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

If you’re staging some epic Star Wars battles you could go original with Red or Blue lightsabers. But what if you decide you’re more of a fan of Jedi and want to go green? Or perhaps the prequels have inspired you to take on purple? Why choose at build time when you can adjust the color to match your mood.

[Phik] built himself a color-selectable lightsaber using RGB LEDs. He sourced a 5M strip of them from eBay for around $20. The pixels are not individually addressable, but each color channel can be driven with a pulse-width modulation signal to mix and match the final color. Now he could have gone with a microcontroller solution, but [Phik] decided to give himself a bit more of a challenge. He built three PWM circuits based on a 555 timer which can be adjusted with a potentiometer. It’s not going to kill any insects, but the keep-it-simple-stupid aspect of the project makes it something we could actually build ourselves. The same cannot be said for most of the replica builds we see.

Simple Ambilight Clone Is Just A Few Transistors

June 27, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 36 Comments

The Ambilight system – built in to high-end Phillips TVs – is a neat system to add a bit of ambiance to regular television viewing. With this system, a series of RGB LEDs are mounted to the rear of the TV to respond to whatever is currently being displayed. [Lovro] came up with a very simple way to add an ambilight system to his computer monitor using only a handful of components.

Unlike other Ambilight clones we’ve seen controlled by custom software or a Processing sketch, [Lovro]’s system uses a few transistors wired to the red, green, and blue pins of his VGA cable. Each of these lines is connected to an RGB LED, so the intensity of each color is determined by the amount of the respective color on the screen.

There is a down side with this setup: a second video output in a mirrored mode is required for this hack to work. Luckily, [Lovro] has a dual-monitor graphics card, making setup a (relative) breeze.

You can check out [Lovro]’s videos of his Ambilight clone in action after the break.

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