Faux LED Scroller Using Phosphorescence

July 13, 2011 by Mike Nathan 38 Comments

poor_mans_phosphorescent_led_scroller

Hackaday reader [BGR] wrote in to share a video he put together showing off a cool “poor man’s LED scroller” that he built. Rather than build a huge array of LEDs, spending tons of time time wiring and programming, he decided to use only a handful of LEDs on a moving display instead.

The scroller is built upon a PIC16F887 microcontroller which resides on an EasyPIC6 dev board he borrowed for the project. The PIC controls a strip of eight bright white LEDs, which are used to write text on a long strip of phosphorescent paper that can be found at many printing supply outfits. The paper’s dispensing mechanism was cobbled together with parts from several sources, including a laser printer and VCR.

When he wants to display a message, he inputs text into a flash application he wrote. The app sends the LED byte values to his scroller via a separate serial proxy that talks to the pic over his computer’s COM port.

The effect is pretty slick, looking similar to a slow-moving diffused LED scroller. The messages disappear after about 5 minutes in a pitch black room, which is perfect, since he originally intended to use the device for displaying Twitter updates. He is already considering a second revision of the project, which he wants to mount on the wall – sounds great to us!

Be sure to swing by YouTube to see the video, or continue reading to watch it here.

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Wearable Video Coat

July 12, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

[David Forbes] is no stranger to the weird and esoteric, so he created a color LED TV built into a lab coat. He plans on bringing it to Burning Man next month.

The RGB LEDs are mounted narrow flex boards, providing a 160×120 pixel NTSC display. Video processing is taken care of by an Xilinx FPGA that takes the YCrCb video feed from a video iPod and converts it into four separate RGB streams for the front, back, and the two sides. The requisite controls for brightness and color are on the shoulders.

Of course, the build wouldn’t be over-the-top without the ability to plug a Nintendo into a lab coat, so there’s an NTSC input on an RCA jack. Everything is powered by two 11.1 V, 5Ah radio-control LiPo battery packs that should power this for a while.

Check out a video of the LED lab coat below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtSm8Oom2n4&w=470]

DIY Clock Replica Is Better Than The Real Thing

July 11, 2011 by Mike Nathan 14 Comments

After seeing the TIX clock for the first time, [Gweedo Steevens] really wanted one, but wasn’t interested in paying the seemingly high asking price over at ThinkGeek. He figured it wouldn’t be too incredibly hard to build his own, so he decided to give it a shot.

The clock relies on 27 LEDs to display the time, which were multiplexed to make the most of his ATMega16 microcontroller’s available IO pins. Once he was happy with how things functioned on breadboard, he migrated the LEDs to a piece of perf board, and etched his own PCB for the controller circuit.

He used an office overhead lighting grate to separate the LEDs, providing nice uniform light segments. He put a piece of clear perspex on the front to cover the LEDs, but later switched it out for a much darker piece, for better daylight viewing.

The finished product is fantastic, and in our opinion looks even better than the retail version – awesome job!

[via HackedGadgets]

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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