Recycle Lithium Cells By Building Custom Flashlights

May 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

This isn’t a brightest flashlight in the world type of hack (but it does manage to push about 1000 lumens). [Stephen Webb] is finding a use for leftover parts by building his own simple LED flashlights. As you can see, he uses PVC parts available at any hardware or home store. These are a good choice; they’re cheap, light weight, resilient, designed to be water tight, they easily thread together and have connectors that reduce the diameter of the fittings.

The electronics use standard size cylindrical Lithium cells. These are found in many types of Laptop and Power Tool batteries. Often when one of those battery packs bites the dust it’s an issue of one or more bad cells. [Stephen] desolders the cells, and reuses the good ones in this project.

We didn’t see any mention of a recharging technique. Does anyone have any advice on how to top these cells off if they’re not in their original power pack form?

Extremely Detailed Light Painting Bar

May 10, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 6 Comments

[Matt Pandina] has been documenting his build of a very nice light painting bar on his G+ page. His light painting bar has 64 RGB LEDs being driven by an ATmega328P and four TLC5940 chips. He wrote his own libraries to talk to the TLC5940 as well as his own libraries to pull images off of a MicroSD card. He also wrote a cross-platform program that automatically converts a directory of pngs to something the TLC5940s expect. He says the secret to getting his24-bit color correction looking right is gamma correction. It seems that when the LEDs were run too bright, he couldn’t get the colors quite right. In case you’re curious, those images are 15 inches tall!

You can follow along through his posts as he starts with just a few LEDs and slowly updates and grows it to the impressive state it is at currently.

Building A Bigger Bar Graph

May 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Take a gander at the Giant LED bar graph which [Chunky Hampton] recently completed (from this image we don’t think the nick name suits him). It’s simple both mechanically and electrically, but we love the look and think it would be a nice addition to your home, hackerspace, or as a children’s museum exhibit (we’re looking at you [Mr. Porter]).

The enclosure is a hunk of PVC electrical conduit. It’s got to be one of the largest sizes, but still should be found at most home stores. The base mounts easily and the cover snaps into place. [Chunky] used a hole saw to create the openings for the LED modules. They’re circular boards with multiple single-color LEDs on them. A common power bus feeds the high side of each bit, while a couple of transistor ICs controlled by 595 shift registers address them on the low side. From there just use any controller you wish, but in this case it’s an Arduino.

[Chunky] uses the meter to display power output from his stationary bicycle generator. But he also put together a little Larson Scanner demo which you can see after the break.

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Reverse Engineering An RGB LED Remote

May 10, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

In the quest to add some mood lighting in his basement, [Mohonri] found an infrared wireless remote that is able to control several RGB LED strips. The only problem with this remote is the inability to control it via a wall-mount panel or even a computer. Obviously this would not stand for such a swank basement, so [Mohonri] did the reasonable thing and reverse engineered one of these remotes.

The build started with ripping the remote apart and figuring out how it ticks. [Mohonri] found the small IR LED transmitter and hooked up an oscilloscope to capture some data. After a bunch of trial and error and a big help from relevant documentation he had the entire button matrix – and thus the functions available to the LED strip – available to output via wall panel or computer.

[Mohonri] hasn’t completed his build yet; this was just the reverse engineering and documentation stage. Now, though, it shouldn’t be hard to control the RGB LED strips through an Arduino, a computer, or even an Android/iOS device with a small IR LED plugged into the headphone jack.

Robotic Light Painting In 3D

May 9, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 1 Comment

For the last few months, [Ben] has been building a 3D light painting robot. Instead of a couple Arduino-controlled LEDs that a person moves around the Lightplot, as [Ben] calls it, uses a robotic arm to move a LED in 3D space.

The build started with [Ben] testing his idea by putting a laser pointer on an altitude and azimuth mount made out of LEGO. Eventually [Ben] decided to build a 3D plotter rig for a more impressive show. The 3D plotter sits in on a tripod with three axes of motion – up and down, clockwise and counterclockwise, and ‘in’ and ‘out’. A small RGB LED at the end of the robotic arm is controlled along with the servos and motors, making it possible to plot vector lines in 3D space.

There are a whole bunch of demo videos after the break. They look fantastic, but we’d really like to see the Lightplot be used outside on a dark, starry night.

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Building Main Street, USA In A Coffee Table

May 7, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

[Alex George] has been collecting miniatures of Main Street, USA in Disney Land hand crafted by artist [Robert Olszewski]. These models are incredibly accurate, but sadly static. [Alex] has some of the floats from the Main Street Electrical Parade that light up with the help of a few LEDs. One day, [Alex] found himself wishing he could watch a miniature parade circling around his diorama and did what any of us would do: make a tiny electrical parade move around his miniature town.

[Alex] began his build by designing a system of chains and sprockets underneath his miniature Main Street. When not on display, the parade floats are hidden underneath the town. At night, though, the parade ascends to the surface to put on a show.

It’s not an electrical parade if there aren’t any lights, so [Alex] grabbed a couple Blinkms to attach to the underside of each float. These are small programmable RGB LEDs that can repeat the same sequence of lights for the entire time the parade is visible. A very excellent job and a masterwork of craftsmanship for both [Alex] and [Robert Olszewski].

[Alex]’s ‘making of’ video and a full demo of the float are available after the break.

via boingboing

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Huge Water And Light VU Meter Plus More

May 4, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

This is the senior design project for a group at the University of Vermont. It’s a wet, bubbly, blinky, interactive thing. Each column is a clear tube filled with water, with a string of fully addressable RGB LEDs suspended in the center. In idle mode, the lights scroll through a series of interesting patterns while the water is filled with bubbles to add some depth to the presentation. There is also a VU meter function, as seen here and during the Portal theme song that ends the video demo after the break.

A Teensy++ board is used to address the display. It’s set up to receive serial commands from a Processing script which is responsible for generating the animations. At the top of the frame you can see there’s a Kinect sensor. By standing in the standard post (we think it should be called the Kinect mug shot) the installation will automatically switch over to body control. We could see this thing making its way into a long airplane terminal hallway, following the travelers along their trek from one terminal to the next.

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