Lucid Dreaming Mask Marries Economy With Comfort

June 18, 2012 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

Here’s an effort to make a cheap lucid dreaming mask that is also comfortable. The idea is in response to the goggles we saw in April (which would not be too comfortable to sleep in) and the wildly successful Remee (which has an $80 target price).

The mask itself is sewn from a child’s fleece blanket. Inside is a piece of foam cut from some recreation mat. You know, those squares made for a play area that connect together like a jigsaw puzzle. You may have already spotted the Arduino in the image above, but the project is designed to run from an AVR chip embedded in the foam. The design only uses three LEDs, which may or may not work for you — we’d guess it depends on how they line up with your eyes. The video after the break does a great job of illustrating each point in the construction.

If you’re looking for something less soothing and more recreational you could always try out these trippy goggles.

Continue reading “Lucid Dreaming Mask Marries Economy With Comfort” →

Adding The Apple ‘breathing LED’ To A Motorcycle

June 12, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

[spiralbrain] has a beautiful KTM Duke 200 motorcycle, but he’s found the factory configuration is a little bit plain. Wanting to add his own unique touch to his bike, he decided to add a ‘breathing LED’ to the parking light that slowly changes its brightness much like the LED on recent Macs.

From the factory, [spiralbrain]’s bike uses extremely inefficient (and somewhat ugly) T10 lamps for the parking light. This was changed over to a 12 Volt white SMD light bulb, but what really makes this build special is the way [spiralbrain] is controlling this lamp.

[spiralbrain] added a very tiny circuit consisting of an 8-pin microcontroller (a PIC12F683) that slowly dims the new SMD light bulb using the built-in PWM module. When the bike is taken out of neutral, the microcontroller stops at the highest PWM setting so the ‘breathing’ LED function is only engaged when not moving.

It’s an interesting mod that’s sure to draw some attention when [spiralbrain] is showing off his bike. As a bonus, the mod is completely reversible, so the bike’s warranty is still good.

A Simple RF Signal Strength Meter

June 12, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 18 Comments

[Scott] wrote in to us with his simple, but well done RF signal strength meter. As he points out in his post, sometimes an Arduino is overkill, so a Picaxe 08M was used instead. Apparently this was a refresh of a high school project that he did. Certainly many of us would have liked to go to that high school!

An interesting part of this project is how he used a laser cutter to produce his PCB traces. This was done by applying black paint to the copper on his board and cutting everywhere he didn’t want copper traces. The results were quite good, and should work well when this project is finalized in an enclosure

Check out the video after the break to see this circuit in action. He explains the build in it, but if you just want to see the signal strength lights come on, fast forward to around 2:25. Continue reading “A Simple RF Signal Strength Meter” →

Making A Light Orb Thingy

June 11, 2012 by Caleb Kraft No comments

The “light orb” has become a staple of light painting projects. If you’ve ever looked through someone’s gallery of light painting, you’ve probably seen a few. There are multiple ways to make them, this project focuses on swinging a light, or multiple lights at the end of a rope while you slowly turn in a circle.

The addition of addressable RGB LEDs and a micro controller make this rig capable of generating patterns and possibly even simple images in the sphere itself. His results are quite impressive. His spheres actually look even more precisely shaped than the automated sphere rig we shared with you before!

Smartphone Controlled RGB Lamp

June 8, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

We keep seeing a lot of RGB lamps, but they’re also constantly increasing in size and complexity. Take this rendition, which uses a lot of RGB LEDs and has smartphone control (translated).

The lamp itself uses 31 RGB LEDs arranged in a sphere that organizes them into three vertical rings. They’re all ganged together (not individually addressable) with one transistor per color. An Arduino board is responsible for control, and the build includes a Bluetooth module for incoming commands.

As you can see above, the Android app driving the device is really quite good. In addition to sliders for color mixing there is a separate window with a color picker. [Remick] included options like favorite color combos, color scrolling, and a timer that will shut the lamp off. We couldn’t embed it here, but you’ll find some demo video at the link above.

Homemade Silicon Carbide LED

June 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Here’s an LED indicator which was made at home out of a Silicon Carbide (SiC) crystal (Internet Archive Mirror). The concept is simple, but a bit of trial and error goes into getting that tiny amber spot to light up.

The guesswork comes in finding the right piece of crystal. First [KOS] broke it into tiny pieces, then he started poking the chunks with electrified probes to see if he could get some light out of them. Once an active area was found he needed a base for the crystal. The image above shows the two nails which he used. This provides a large mounting area that also acts as a heat sink to make sure the LED won’t burn itself out. There’s a solder blob which he kept molten with his iron until the crystal could be pushed into place. That holds it securely as the pin which serves as the cathode is positioned.

The whole setup is soldered to some protoboard and is ready to use. This is the second time we remember seeing this technique used to fabricate LEDS. The first time was an accident.

Open Hardware Moodlamp With ATmega

June 5, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

[Daniel Andrade] has built a pretty cool mood lamp circuit. He was initially inspired by [Toon Beerton’s] Ikea lamp, but found he just didn’t have the knowledge to proceed with the PIC processor. He rushed out and bought an arduino to begin learning. Once he figured out how to properly make a mood lamp function, he created a custom circuit to utilize an ATmega chip instead of his whole arduino. He’s now on his second revision of the circuit and is sharing all the files with whoever would like to download them.

His circuit utilizes a 3wRGB LED and any ATmega 8/168/328. He has left some space for expansion on the board as well just in case you’d like to add sensors of some kind (he mentions a temp sensor).