Trash Heap Projector

March 29, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5jymxi62RI]

Being hackers, sometimes we just want to hack something together, not engineer it. This projector is a great example. Made mostly out of cardboard and duct tape (or duck tape if you prefer). He picked up a 12v LED array, a cheap fresnel lens, an LCD from a “back up monitor” and a focusing lens taken from a magnifying glass. Sure, we’ve seen better, much better. But seeing an evenings worth of feverish wire twisting and taping is always pleasant. It may look pretty dim in the video, it may be as well, but keep in mind that it is common for them to appear much brighter in person or if shot with a night setting on a digital camera.

Flash Animations On Peggy2.0

March 29, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/10453715]

The LED display toy known as the Peggy2.0 just keeps getting cooler and cooler. [Leonard] is now sharing with us how we can stream flash animations to one. It requires some Java and an Arduino, but the final effect is quite fluid and responsive. We’ve seen the Peggy grow from basically an electronic litebright to doing video and even being chained together to make larger displays.

[via EMSL]

That’s A Big Flashlight

March 26, 2010 by Mike Szczys 57 Comments

Going camping? You’ll need an extra backpack to carry this flashlight along the way. On the business end you’ll find 500 five millimeter super-bright white LEDs, on the opposite end there’s ten times the number of controls you’d expect on a flashlight. At full power, the LED array pulls down 50 Watts, making us question the battery life of the unit. Check out the walk-through after the break. The LEDs are mounted on proto-board, making for some extreme point-to-point soldering. During the control demonstration there’s a background noise like a jet powering up, what’s that all about?

While this terrific torch brings a grin to our faces, we wonder if it wouldn’t do better as a vehicle mounted illuminator. Or if a microcontroller was tossed into the mix some creative code could make this a pretty powerful yet non-lethal weapon.

Continue reading “That’s A Big Flashlight” →

Light Up Your Ride With An LED Mohawk

March 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[Garrett Birkel’s] weekly ride usually features some pretty wild costumes. He wanted something to step up his own look so he make this LED mohawk bike helmet. He had an LED strip to start with and found a way to use acrylic and clear plastic tubing to fold the lights into the appropriate shape. From there he designed a PCB for some DC-DC converters to provide regulated power. The juice comes from Lithium Iron-Phosphate cells, the same kind we saw in the electric bike assist battery a few days ago. We find it a bit wild that you can pick out the PWM of the LEDs in the lens effect of that photograph.

LED Lighting, A Learning Experience

March 18, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

[Joel] has a very specific color temperature of lighting he wants in his home. So specific, he’s decided to build his own LED lighting to get it. Actually, he’s still searching for that perfect shade of white, but doing so has learned a lot. He initially made some very pretty PCBs, but then found that hand soldering them made quite a mess. What better time to delve into reflowing? He shares his positive initiation to the skillet method in his latest update. The search still continues for that nice warm glow he’s desiring. We’ve actually seen [Joel] before, he likes smoked meat.

Make Your Own OLEDS

March 17, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 31 Comments

The University of Wisconsin is hosting a tutorial on how to make your own Organic Light Emitting Diodes. This is so amazingly awesome. We want you guys to make some. Someone make your own matrix and display some patterns on it and submit it. Please. Though we’ve seen lots of uses for OLED screens, we never really delved into the process of creating them. It looks much less complicated than we would have imagined.

[via MakeZine]

LEDs Invade Coffee Table Crevice

March 8, 2010 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

That’s a lot of LEDs, and a little bit of glass cleaner. [Tobias] spiced up his IKEA coffee table by adding 6144 LEDs. This is a larger realization of SparkFun’s LED coffee table which used 64 8×8 modules. [Tobias] sourced three display boards from Sure Electronics for a total of 96 8×8 modules. These boards are addressed through a serial interface; four serial lines for each board but a shared data bus for each of the row select pins and the data/latch/clock pins. This method uses 19 of the 20 pins on the Arduino that drives the display. After the break you can see a demonstration. If this is more than you need there’s always the 112-LED and 81-LED table projects that can produce a full color range. Continue reading “LEDs Invade Coffee Table Crevice” →