Water Droplet Sculpture Using LEDs And Arduino

March 11, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

This water sculpture can stop drops of water in mid-air. This is accomplished by flashing LEDs to illuminate the droplets at just the right time. But it’s not limited to blinky lights alone. The top of the frame has eight nozzles, each fed by its own pump. An Arduino controls the pumps and the lights making it possible to create different motion effects by adjusting how events line up. For instance, the image above shows just two of the water nozzles on, but in the video after the break it appears one is dripping downward while the other is dripping upward.

Alas, there’s few build details for this but the source code is available for downloading. If we were going to build one of these ourselves we’d probably try to regulate the drips using some solenoids built from scratch. How would you do it? Leave your ideas in the comments.

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DIY Flower Bouquet Guaranteed To Get You Dumped On Valentine’s Day

March 10, 2011 by Mike Nathan 36 Comments

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[Erik] is a broke engineer.

When this past Valentine’s day rolled around he didn’t have any cash to buy a gift for his girlfriend, so he had to get creative. Every girl likes flowers, but unless he was going to give his lady some day old daises from the grocery dumpster, he would have to make them himself.

He started by bundling together and bending some T-shirt hangers into stems. He then wrapped them in the green & green/white wire pairs from some Cat-5 cable to give them some color. An old keyboard was sacrificed to create the flower petals and leaves, which were presumably colored with markers before being glued to the end of the hangers. He added a reed switch to the flower pot, which illuminates the LEDs he installed under the petals when a magnet-bearing cardboard placard reading “Love Erik” was placed near it.

How did his girlfriend like them? Well, let’s just say she’s no longer in the picture. He didn’t tell us if the bouquet was the reason, only that she’s gone. (though we happen to think it’s pretty cool).

Keep reading to see a quick video demonstration of the light-up bouquet.

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Shedding Some Light On Your Kitchen Chores

March 8, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

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[Garret] over at Macetech wanted to supplement the lighting over his kitchen sink, which is always too dark at night. He says his house is a “geek house”, so a standard light socket just wouldn’t do – he would have to construct a LED bar for over the sink instead.

Since nobody wants to use a light switch with wet or messy hands, he did what anyone would do and rigged up a motion detection circuit to automatically turn the lights on and off for him. 16 bright white 10mm LEDs were mounted in some foam core board, along with a PIR motion sensor. He used an ATiny84 to handle the PWM fade-in and fade-out of the lights, as well as to keep track of the activity (or lack thereof) at the sink.

He does admit that the ATiny84 is way overpowered for this project, but he lacked anything smaller, and says that 555 timers wouldn’t give him the smooth light fading that he desired. Regardless, it works as advertised, and now nobody has to peel potatoes in the dark any more.

Continue reading to check out a quick video demo of the motion-sensing light system.

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Follow-up: Radio-controlled LED Light Show

March 5, 2011 by Mike Nathan 10 Comments

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[Alan] shared an update with us regarding a project he has been working on for some time, radio-controlled LED light strips destined for use by the Travelling Light Circus. If you are not familiar with the project or need a quick refresher, you can read our post about it here.

He recently met up with the guys from TLC to finish things up and was happily surprised that they did not want to mount his lights on the performers, as was originally planned. He would have had to make a few modifications if that was the case, but instead, they planned on attaching them to bicycle wheels. The light strips were mounted inside translucent plastic tubes that fan out from the center of the wheels, where the battery and radio equipment is located. The wheels were mounted on aluminum poles, allowing the performers to create a visually stunning show, just by spinning the pole.

Check out the pair of videos we have embedded below, the project came together quite nicely.

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LED Backlight Conversion Using Recycled CCFL Inverter Parts

March 4, 2011 by Mike Nathan 11 Comments

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[Ammon] repairs busted LCD monitors as a side hobby, so replacing burned out CCFLs and inverter circuits is something he can do in his sleep. One Dell monitor he received had him so perplexed, that he simply gave up on trying to repair the inverter circuit. He still wanted to get it working, so he had some narrow PCBs made and started working on his LED replacement backlight.

He built a driver board for the LEDs, populated with left over components that he stripped from the LCD panel’s inverter circuit. He needed space to insert his driver board, so he simply cut out a chunk of the inverter board and slipped his replacement driver board in its place. As you can see in the picture above, his board (in green) takes up far less space than the original inverter circuit it replaces.

He provides a schematic for his circuit as well as a PCB layout file, so it should be fairly easy to replicate his work. He has not posted schematics or layout information for his LED strips, but we’re betting he will if someone asks nicely.

Check out this pair of posts if you are interested in reading more about replacing your burned out CCFL with LEDs.

Arduino Based Ambient Lighting Improvements

March 3, 2011 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Simon] improved upon an existing hack by making this Arduino ambient lighting system that has four different color regions. He was inspired by [Roy’s] processing-based setup which we saw a few weeks ago. That system used processing to determine the average color of the currently displayed image, then it displayed the color on a single RGB LED strip. [Simon] was thinking a little bit bigger.

He purchased a lighting strip that could be cut into different sections and then set out to develop his own software for multiple color regions. He had little or no experience with Processing so he went one abstraction layer lower and used Java to code his interface. It’s got a lot of nice settings where you can tweak how, when, and why colors are displayed. In the end he has four independently addressable color strip on the left, right, top-left, and top-right of the screen. The best part is that the Java suite he developed can be used on different platforms, having been already tested on Windows and Linux.

LED Artwork Disappears Right Before Your Eyes

March 2, 2011 by Mike Nathan 47 Comments

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If you walked into an art gallery and saw nothing but blank canvases lining the wall, you might be compelled to demand your money back, or assume that you had discovered the world’s laziest artist. If this gallery happened to be displaying work by [Brad Blucher and Kyle Clements] however, you would be mistaken.

These two artists have collaborated to create a series of works titled, “Take a Picture“. Each picture they have built is constructed to look like an empty canvas when viewed with the naked eye. If you were to take a picture of the canvas with your cell phone or digital camera however, a whole new world would open up in front of your eyes. Their artwork is constructed using infrared LEDs, which cannot be seen with the naked eye, but are visible to nearly any CMOS or CCD sensor on the market. The images range from simple smiley faces and objects to abstract geometric shapes.

It’s a very simple, yet novel approach, and we happen to think it’s pretty cool. The artists have not said what they have planned for this project in the future, but we’d love to see it expanded using larger LED arrays to display higher-resolution images, or even short movies.

Keep reading to see how they went about creating these works of art as well as a promo video demonstrating the effect.

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