Shift Powered Pumpkins

October 19, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 15 Comments

4021144025_362a11d544_b

[Garret] and a couple of friends totally stole our idea wanted to light up their pumpkins a bit differently this year. They used some ShiftBrites and all the corresponding shift hardware (who knew there was so much shift out there) to bring their carved orange minions to life. Yes, this could be done a lot less modulated by using a regular LED and perhaps a PIC. Maybe it’s not the most technically challenging, but hey its in the spirit of Halloween – one of our favorite holidays. Speaking of which, doesn’t that fence look familiar? Check out a video after the break. Seriously, Mutton Chops? Continue reading “Shift Powered Pumpkins” →

Build Your Own Wristwatch

October 19, 2009 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

surface-mount-wristwatch

[rgbphil] has done a great job detailing how he built his Microdot wristwatch.This project is a lot more approachable than the pong watch we saw last month. If you’ve made a few printed circuit boards, but haven’t yet tried working with surface mount component, this is a great way to give it a try.

The parts count is pretty low, a few switches, resistors, capacitors, LEDs, a watch crystal, and a PIC 16F88 microcontroller.[rgbphil] is using a charlieplex so that a separate shift register is not needed to drive all of the LEDs. He goes into detail about the process of laying out the circuit. Some of the problems he encounters include how to manage all of the charlieplex connections in a simple way, how to program the chip once it’s on the board, and how to layout the controls for the device.

The display looks great in the video we’ve embedded after the break. We’re going to add these components to our next parts order and make this project part of the plan for getting us through the long cold winter ahead.

Continue reading “Build Your Own Wristwatch” →

72 LED Persistence Of Vision Globe

October 15, 2009 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

HaD-pov-globe

[Ben] told us about his POV globe yesterday. We took a look and saw just one photo and the code with no real explanation of his project. He certainly set to work over night and now we see all the goodies we look for in a great build log. He even threw the Hackaday logo up for our enjoyment. His build is well executed and he found some creative ways around the common problems in these projects. We take a closer look after the break. Continue reading “72 LED Persistence Of Vision Globe” →

Multi-touch LCD From LEDs

October 10, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 8 Comments

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiJsBaBAUL4%5D

[Thomas] promised nearly a year ago he would give the community code and schematics of how he made his LED Multi-touch panel, but we would have to wait for his next version first. Well its finally here, bigger and better then we could ever have imagined. His new version is organized as a 48 by 32 matrix of 1536 LEDs, but he’s gone further by placing it behind a stripped LCD to make a multi-touch display. It doesn’t seem nearly as fast or accurate as the original, but potentially could be more portable than ones we’ve seen before. And yes, this time around he included how his LED matrix is made.

POV Fan EEPROM Hack

October 9, 2009 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

pov_fan_eeprom_hacking

Hacking with Gum got their hands on one of the persistence of vision display fans that Cenzic was giving away at Blackhat this year. It’s not the biggest fan-based POV display we’ve seen but it’s still a fun device to tinker with. They hacked into the EEPROM on the device in order to change the message the fan displayed.

This is very similar to the other EEPROM reading/writing we’ve seen recently. Hacking with Gum read the data off of the EEPROM and then disassembled it to discover how the message data is stored on the chip. This was made easier by noting the messages displayed when the fan is running. The first byte of data shows the number of words in the message, then each chunk of word data is preceded by one byte that represents the number of letters in that work. Data length was calculated based on the number of pixels in each display character. Once he knew the data-storage scheme, it was just a matter of formatting his own messages in the same way and overwriting the chip.

This is a great write-up if you’re looking for a primer on reverse engineering an unknown hardware system. If you had fun trying out our barcode challenges perhaps deciphering EEPROM data from a simple device should be your next quest.

[Thanks James]

Installing A Starscape Ceiling

October 8, 2009 by Mike Szczys 33 Comments

[Mike Galloway] set out to install a lighted starscape in the ceiling of the baby room. We remember first coming across this type of thing at a Planet Hollywood restaurant at least 10 years ago. We’ve always wondered how difficult this type of thing is to install.

This setup involves an LED based illuminator and bundles of fiber optics. [Mike] first mounted the illuminator in the corner of the room at ceiling level and ran the bundles of fiber optics up into the attic. He then used a cordless dremel to drill 1/16″ holes, one for each fiber in the bundle. This translates to a lot of holes! Once everything was in place, he filled the holes with glue to hold the fibers in place, and snipped off the excess from the room-side using a fingernail clipper. We’ve embedded his video of the system in action after the break.

This may take some time, but it seems easy enough and now we know how these ceilings work.

Continue reading “Installing A Starscape Ceiling” →