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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Blinky Headgear

June 25, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

This hat has a chasing LED feature thanks to our old friend the 555 timer. [BananaSlug] even built in the option to change the speed at the push of a button.

His design starts out with a costume hat. Each of the 25 LEDs is soldered to a 2×4 hole chunk of protoboard. The LED package is pushed through a slit in the hat, but the protoboard remains on the inside where it can be sewn in place. From there [BananaSlug] soldered one negative bus around the circumference, and an individual positive lead from each module back to the control board. They’re addressed by a set of CD4017 decade counters which are clocked by the 555 timer circuit.

This is a great little analog/logic project and the style is perfect if you’ve got the coat to go along with it.

Bring Your LED Matrix Project Into The Living Room

June 22, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

If you’re able to make a project look this good it shouldn’t be hard to convince that significant other to let you install it in a prominent place in the house. We think [Greg Friedland] pulled this off perfectly by building a 4’x8′ tablet controlled LED matrix.

First of all, everything looks better in a shiny case. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this looks nice, thanks to the face plates which are mounted in a way that gives them a modern style (we’d expect to see this hanging in Ikea). They’re acrylic diffuser panels meant for used with lighting in a suspended ceiling. They do a nice job of scattering the light put off by the 544 LED modules that make up the display. The wiring was made easy by using LED strands where each pixel has its own control chip (WS2801). It sounds like the display will peak at around 160 Watts, which isn’t really that much considering the area. One nice touch that’s shown off in the video after the break is a full-feature iPad interface that even allows you to paint in light using your finger. But we’re also satisfied that [Greg] posted about the physical build too.

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Musical Light Show Is Far Less Complex Than You Might Think

June 21, 2012 by Mike Nathan 15 Comments

color-changing-light-tube

[Matt and Jason Tardy], who make up the musical performance duo known as AudioBody, were recently featured on Make: explaining how they put on one of their trademark segments. The most popular portion of their show features color changing tubes of light which the pair spin and fling around not unlike a higher-tech version of the Blue Man Group. While the visuals are pretty slick, the technique behind it is far simpler than most people initially imagine.

As you can see in video below, the tubes look to be nothing more than simple white lights. As the brothers work through their performance however, the tubes switch from white to blue and back again with a liquid-like transition between the colors.

The [Tardys] say that most people peg a microcontroller or other complex electronics as the source of their light wizardry, but the real answer is much simpler. Embedded in the end of each tube is a bright LED flashlight. A sliding blue filter positioned inside the tube provides the silky smooth transition between colors – no fancy electronics required.

If you would like to see how they were built, be sure to swing by the AudioBody web site for a how-to presentation by the [Tardys] themselves.

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Revolight Clone

June 20, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Fabian.E] wanted to light up the rims on his bike, but didn’t want to shell out a bunch of clams to get it done. He came up with this system which uses magnets and reed switches to light up one arc or each bicycle wheel.

He calls it the lightrider and it’s based on the revolights concept. That design uses a microcontroller which is capable of animating patterns when the wheels aren’t spinning. [Fabian’s] version can’t do that, but the effect while moving is basically the same. The ring of LEDs around the rim is connected to a battery via a set of reed switches. When these switches move past a magnet on the fork it completes the circuit and switches on that segment of LEDs. The clip after the break gives a demonstration of the finished product, and includes a fast-motion video of the fabrication process.

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