LED Wand For Light Painting Photography

July 11, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

[Michael Ross] is a photographer who has been getting into light painting recently. He’s come up with his own RGB light wand to create some amazing images, and also written a very, very thorough tutorial (PDF warning) on how to build your own light wand.

The light wand is based on an Arduino Mega board and uses an RGB LED strip based on the HL1606 controller chip. We’ve covered these LED strips before, and they’re very easy to use with the requisite library. So far, [Michael] has built a 48-LED light wand and a 16-LED wand with a 6-position program selector, making it easy to do awesome single-exposure photos like this.

[Michael] creates his images in an Excel spreadsheet – rows are which LED to address and columns are units of time. The picture data is then copied and pasted straight from the Excel worksheet to the Arduino source code. This in itself is a pretty clever use of Excel.

Check out the how [Michael] creates one of his light paintings here.

VU Meter Scarf Lights Up The Night

July 8, 2011 by Mike Nathan 10 Comments

vu_meter_scarf

[Eli Skipp] wrote in to share a project she has been working on bit by bit, for over a year – an LED VU meter scarf. The project was originally going to be built using a custom PCB, but no matter how long she spent troubleshooting the piece, it just wouldn’t work right. She eventually broke down and purchased a VU meter kit, which worked out quite a bit better than the homebrew version.

The VU meter circuitry is tucked away inside the scarf as she shows in the video below. The LEDs are connected using conductive thread sourced from Lamé Lifesaver, which she says is far more durable than other threads she has tried. After originally testing the VU meter, she was unimpressed by the output of the LEDs, so she swapped them out for brighter ones, which look much better. It looks like it works quite well – we definitely dig the idea of a scarf with a built-in VU meter, even if it was partially built from a kit.

Continue reading to see [Eli] give a quick demonstration and a rundown of the scarf’s construction.

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MB LED Is Next Generation Of LED Video Block Puzzles

July 6, 2011 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Meet MBLed, a set of interactive 8×8 LED tiles. Put them next to each other and they will orient themselves into a video screen which is the sum of the parts. If this sounds familiar it’s because we’ve seen the concept before in the GLiP project. [Guillaume] tells us that MB Led is the new version of GLiP and from what we’ve seen they’ve made a lot of progress.

The hardware is well designed. A PCB hosts the STM32 microcontroller and a pair of pin headers which receive the RGB LED matrix module. A pair of AA battery holders make up the legs for the device. Each has infrared receiver/emitter pairs on each of the four edges and constantly polls for its neighbors.

What really impresses us is the algorithms they’re using for communications. FreeRTOS runs on the ARM processors, and a series of messages was developed which allow the blocks to elect a leader, and follow its commands via the distributed system. Check out more about those algorithms on the page linked above, and join us after the break to see the demo video.

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Magic Locket

July 6, 2011 by Nick Schulze 21 Comments

[Andrey] from RTFM has built himself a glowing LED pendant using only three parts and some simple code. The hack is not particularly complicated but [Andrey] provides some decent instructions on Pickaxe programming via an RS232 serial port and RGB LED control to produce the nice glowing effects. The pendant contains an RGB LED, a Pickaxe-08 microcontroller and a couple of button cell batteries. To cram everything inside the locket, [Andrey] had to grind down the LED and Pickaxe-08 to their minimum dimensions using a file.

All of the Basic code for the pendant is supplied on the project page and [Andrey] describes how he manages to PWM all three LED pins for the colour effects. The video after the break may be of interest to anyone who has not had a go at Picaxe programming before or for a beginner who wants to try out some new embedded devices without a big hit to the wallet.

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Not Your Ordinary LED Book Light

July 2, 2011 by Mike Nathan 11 Comments

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[Steve Hoefer] is not a huge fan of traditional table lamps, so he set off to build a reading light of his own that was more aesthetically pleasing than the standard fare. He thought it would be pretty appropriate to construct his reading lamp out of a book, and we’re inclined to agree.

He stripped the pages from an old book he found at the thrift store, then built a plywood frame to fill in the recently vacated area. A second frame was built inside the first to support the installation of some warm LED strips as well as the acrylic sheet he used to diffuse the light. A whisker switch was installed in the corner of the frame, which turns the lights on when the book is opened. The lamp puts out about the light equivalent of a 40W bulb, and can be “dimmed” by simply adjusting how far the cover is opened.

It looks great on his bedside table, and like some of his other book-related hacks, it’s quite useful as well!

Be sure to check out the video of the light’s construction we have embedded below.

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Giant POV Tube For Light Painting

June 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan 29 Comments

writing_in_the_night_with_the_light_scythe

When you really want your feelings known, we always say that bigger is better. [Gavin Smith, aka The Mechatronics Guy] must come from the same school of thought, because there’s absolutely no mistaking what he is trying to say with his latest project.

Inspired by this WiFi signal painter we featured a while back, the LightScythe is a 2 meter long bar composed of multi-color LED strips that he bought from Adafruit. The light bar is controlled by a Seeduino micro controller, which takes direction from his laptop via a pair of XBee units. Once he generates an image from text with ImageMagic, a Python script is used to match the colors as close as possible to the RGB color space. The image is then converted to raw serial data for playback on the Scythe. When he is ready to go, he triggers his camera to take a 10-15 second exposure, during which he walks across the frame, painting his images with the LightScythe.

We always enjoy seeing creative derivations of previous projects we have covered, and the LightScythe does it well. He actually built a pair of these that can work in concert or independently, which we imagine can make for some pretty awesome pictures.

Be sure to check out his Flickr photostream for more examples of what the LightScythe can do.

A Beautiful Fibre Optic Chandelier

June 25, 2011 by Nick Schulze 14 Comments

[Bill] Decided that his living room could use some more light, or at least some more colourful light. To meet his needs [Bill] has designed and build what he describes as a modern/contemporary chandelier. The chandelier uses about 250′ of fibre optic cable to distribute the light from eight LED’s, light from the fibre optics is being diffused using marbles in place of the globes you would normally expect in a chandelier.

Control is achieved wirelessly via a pair of Xbee modules, this will allow [Bill] to integrate it into his home automation project he plans for the future. The colours are currently set using three slide potentiometers, and the chandelier is powered using a repurposed ATX power supply. It looks like a lot of time was spent on the acrylic enclosure and it was worth it because the results are fantastic. Check out his website for build details and the video after the break for a demonstration on the chandelier in action.

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