Smother Yourself In Addressable LEDs

December 15, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

Guess where this guy’s headed in his suit of many colors? If you said Burning Man give your self a pat on the back. After making a half-hearted EL suit for the festival in 2010 [Sander] decided he needed to step it up this year. He bought and affixed 200 LED modules to this suit so that he could light up the night.

They’re mounted in a grid, and in order to keep the changing patterns orderly he mapped the physical location of each in his code using a two-dimensional array. The controller uses an Arduino nano to push the patterns out to the array via SPI.

[Sander] included several different visual effects for the controller. One strobes the suit starting from the right cuff when he shakes someone’s hand. There’s also an audio spectrum analyzer chip and microphone that let him pulse the lights to music. You can see how bright this thing is in the image above, but to get the full effect shouldn’t skip the video after the break.

He’s entered the project into the Full Spectrum Laser Cutter giveaway. If he wins, we expect laser cut goodness for next year’s festival!

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Adding HTTP To Ikea DIODER

December 14, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 5 Comments

[Alex] sent in a neat Ikea DIODER build that controls strings of RGB LEDs with HTTP requests.

We’ve seen Ikea DIODERs controlled wirelessly and over USB, but using the Internet with a DIODER is new to us. For his build, [Alex] used a Nanode, a small Arduino-like board that has built-in web connectivity.

The hardware portion of the build is very simple. A MOSFET controls each LED strip on the DIODER. The stock controller of the DIODER was ditched, meaning [Alex] needed to figure out how to convert an RGB color space to a Hue, Saturation, and Lightness color space “for super-classy fading.” Once that was figured out, [Alex] implemented a 1D Perlin noise function to blend between two colors.

Finally, the great EtherCard library was used to turn HTTP requests into dancing LEDs. [Alex] is thinking about building a JQuery webpage so he won’t have to muck around with entering commands like 192.168.1.25/hsl?i=0&h=135&s=90&l=50 into a browser. Without a nice web interface, it’s not as futuristic as [Alex] would like, but it’s still cool to us.

GE Color Effects Hacking For The Nautically Inclined

December 12, 2011 by Mike Nathan 7 Comments

ge-color-effects-controller

[Jim] wrote in to share some work he did with GE Color Effects LED lights in an effort to create a light display for his boat. He saw our coverage of the Color Effects G-35 hacking efforts by DeepDarc last year, and knew that they would be prefect for the boat. He did some careful scouring of eBay to score 8 strings of lights at bargain basement pricing, then he got down to the business of hacking them.

He originally built a control circuit using a single PIC18F, but just before he started to put everything together, he realized that wiring everything up would be a huge undertaking. Going back to the drawing board, he decided it would be best to replace the lights’ stock board with one of his own. Now, he uses a single master controller board to send messages to his slave “pods”, significantly cutting down the amount of wiring required for the project.

The display looks great as you can see in the video below, though as many do, [Jim] has plenty of improvements in mind for the future.

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Lighted Fan Pull Saves You From Flailing Around In The Dark

December 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 25 Comments

lighted-fan-pull

Like many people, [yardleydobon] had a hard time locating his ceiling fan’s pull chain at night when his room is completely dark. Rather than continue to flail around blindly grasping for the chain, he decided to find a way to illuminate it instead.

He started off by disassembling a solar garden light, retaining the solar cell, photoresistor, and batteries. After paring down the electronics to the bare essentials, he mounted them inside a plastic battery storage case which he attached to the outside of the fan’s lamp. [yardleydobon] then ran a pair of wires from the electronics box down to end of the chain, where he added an LED and a translucent pull to diffuse the light.

He admits that it’s not the nicest looking modification around, but it does the job in a pinch. He has some ideas that he may put into play if he has the time to revise the design, and we bet that many of you do as well. If so, be sure to share them in the comments.

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Follow Up: Star Wars Tree Gets An Upgrade

December 9, 2011 by Mike Nathan 2 Comments

We asked, and [Zach] listened.

Earlier this week, we featured a circuit he built which allowed his tiny Star Wars Christmas tree to visually replicate the series’ theme song. Several of you, along with myself, thought it would be far cooler if the tree also played the music to accompany the light show, so [Zach] set off to add that functionality.

Worried that the music would get annoying if it played along with the lights constantly, he tweaked his circuit design to incorporate a piezo buzzer that could be easily switched on and off. After wiring it to the MSP430 driving the light show, he tweaked the program to output signals to both the light string and buzzer simultaneously.

While the light show accurately represented the song, he initially ignored flat and sharp notes as they would be indistinguishable to the eye. In audio form however, the missing notes would be glaringly obvious, so he re-transcribed the sheet music resulting in the video you see below.

If you happened to follow [Zach’s] lead and put one of these together in your own house, be sure to swing by his site and grab the latest code, complete with audio track.

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Color Sensing With An RGB LED And Photoresistor

December 8, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Fjord Carver] brings together an RGB LED and CdS Photoresistor to make a color sensor. Those Cadmium Sulfide lights sensors usually have a very wide swing of resistance when exposed to varying levels of light sensitivity. That makes for great resolution when reading them using the ADC of a microcontroller. The LED comes into play by shining known wavelengths of light on the surface being measured. Three separate readings are taken with each of the LED’s different colors, then used to extrapolate the RGB value of the test material. We saw the very same method used a couple of years back. This time around it’s an Arduino doing the measuring instead of a PIC.

So why isn’t that sensor shown in this picture? It’s because we appreciate the application which [Fjord] is using for this sensor. He built a lamp that shines the same color as the surface on which it is placed.

The Force Is Strong With This Christmas Tree Light Show

December 5, 2011 by Mike Nathan 6 Comments

[Zach] is a huge Star Wars fan, and in addition to the array holiday decorations that adorn his house, he says that his wife is nice enough to let him put up a Christmas tree full of Star Wars ornaments. For the past few years, the tree sat in the corner of the room unlit, but his wife thought that it should have some lights this year.

His wife came home with a small string of battery-operated lights, but [Zach] wanted something with a bit more geek cred. He decided to program the lights to play the Star Wars theme song, translating the tune’s pitch to light intensity.

He dug through his bin of electronics and found an MSP430 along with a small target board that would do the job nicely. He sat down with some sheet music, translating the notes to PWM values, resulting in the light show you see below.

While his wife provided a lovely violin accompaniment to the tree, we think that a small audio module would make a great addition to the tree next year.

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