Scoreboard From Scratch

July 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 22 Comments

[Kenneth] built this scoreboard for use at a ballpark that lacks such luxuries. We think this a phenomenal application for his skill and his pocketbook. He laid out PCBs for each digit in Eagle and etched them himself, then installed the indicators for home score, visitor score, inning, balls, strikes, and outs in a laser cut case. A pretty beefy battery along with the folding stand make this quite portable.

In the demo video after the break he’s connected to the scoreboard via telnet to update the score. This trick is accomplished using SparkFun’s WiFly GSX breakout board to set up an adhoc wireless network. The goal is to write an iPhone app that will be used to control the board in the field (or the outfield as it were).

This could definitely be used for different types of scoring during the off season.

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Web-enabled LED Pegboard

July 26, 2010 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

[Norm Santos] whipped up an LED light board that you can draw on through their web interface. We tried it out but unfortunately the live feed is currently offline. That doesn’t diminish our appreciation for the time-lapse build video after the break. Indeed it was a mountain of hot glueing and a couple of days of soldering. Our only beef is that for every LED on the board there are three empty peg holes. To us this is just begging to be augmented with blue, green, and white LEDs for a more spectacular result. What they have now encompases 350 LEDs managed by five microcontrollers, which took about two days to solder (for five people) and to hammer out some code. Continue reading “Web-enabled LED Pegboard” →

LED Matrix With A Gross Of Pixels

July 21, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

This LED matrix is arranged in a 24×6 pattern for message scrolling. There’s no etched boards here, making us wonder where [Syst3mX] found protoboard this long. He’s using an Arduino to drive the demonstration (clip after the break) but you can use any microcontroller with this setup. That’s because he’s using three shift registers for column data and a decade counter for row scanning, requiring just five control pins.

While you’re going to the trouble of ordering components, maybe you should try your hand at building a touch sensitive LED matrix too.

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16-pixel Handheld Gaming

July 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

What we need in today’s handhelds is LESS resolution. Take a look at the video after the break to see the exciting action that [Bruno Pasquini] 4×4 LED matrix handheld game delivers. The device is made up of 16 bi-color LEDs, four buttons, and a PIC 16F628. There’s no schematic yet but it looks like there’s no need for shift registers, just some transistors to handle the current load for the rows of each color. We’ve seen a 64-pixel handheld that plays Super Mario Brothers, but this portable brings a top scrolling racing game with just 25% of that display size.

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Decatron Stand-in

July 6, 2010 by Mike Szczys 66 Comments

Think the swirling glow of a Decatron is cool but don’t want to deal with the voltage issues? [Osgeld] sidestepped the problem by developing a fake Decatron. Admiral Nelson (Captain Morgan’s cheaper cousin) provided the enclosure in the form of an airplane sized liquor bottle. The LEDs are common-something (not sure if it’s anode or cathode) so they end up being individually addressable through the mess of wires coming out the end. This will greatly simplify that kitchen timer we’ve been meaning to build. See the blinking lights go around and around after the break.

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No Touch LED Lamp

July 3, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wV2UIOV1Fk]

This elegant looking lamp uses capacitance sensing to turn on and off. [Mikey77] takes us through the process of making the curved circuits and putting it all together. The circuit is built to be modular, so he could use it elsewhere. That’s a pretty good idea for someone who is always tossing projects together. As usual, schematics are available in the instructable. We love this design and would proudly use this at our office desk.

Great Interactive LED Puzzle

July 2, 2010 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

The GLIP project takes the delight of blinking LEDs and combines it with the ingenuity of modular communications. This takes the Puzzlemation concept a few steps further. In that project the modules were programmed through a base station and could be removed and used as a puzzle from there. The GLIP project uses a master block that you can see tethered in the photo. But the blocks communicate with each other via an infrared protocol. This way they can be continuously updated as they are place next to each other. Each module includes an STM32F105 ARM Cortex-M3 processor, quite a punch for the little blocks. Take a look at what they can do after the break.

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