[Jared] sent us a feature he posted involving time-lapse photography and an LED. Using a custom built aparatus an LED is moved on two axis’ during a long exposure of around thirty seconds. The frame is wood and PVC with two gearhead motors powered by AA batteries to provide the locomotion. The LED is powered by a 3v button cell and automatically transitions through different colors.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK9en2H7rBA]
We’ve brought you an HDD clock in the past, but [mb1988] tried to bring his project to another level by fully documenting it (in Polish). Inspired by [dzgdzzh]’s version of the same invention, [mb1988] decided to reverse engineer it (as well as make a few changes) and base it on the powerful ATmega128. Since this clock, along with most HDD clocks, can only display solid lines of radii, it cannot be used to display text. However, color schemes and animations can be toggled using a remote control. The housing itself is also pretty impressive. The back part of the enclosure was molded out of Rayobond, while the front was simply the original HDD case but spray-painted black and etched with some original artwork. The source code, schematics, and PCB layouts are freely available to download on the project’s thread, but you will have to login to the forum to access them.
We’ve seen bright bike lamps before. This one caught our eye because it needs a heat sink while in operation. [700lumenLED] built a super bright light for his bike that features an aluminum enclosure and heat sinks to protect the LEDs against overheating. Some nice work was done incorporating the 12v battery into a bike bottle with the power switch and a dimming potentiometer attached to the bottle cap.
For some, a peggy 2.0 is pretty cool, but simply not impressive enough. [MonsieurBon] felt this way and simply built a larger LED rig for his peggy2.0. It still uses the brains of the peggy, but the LED array is a custom built cabinet, using ping pong balls as diffusers. Another interesting modification is that they added a midi port to the setup to generate music based on what LEDs are lit. They say it creates some nice background generative music during the game of life. You can see a video of the system in action after the break.
It looks like they weren’t the only ones with this idea. The u:moon project is very similar, meant to be hung from a balloon. There seems to be an issue with the gallery on his page though, so you might want to go to his picasa gallery.
[blip.tv ?posts_id=2542286&dest=-1]
These wearable LED toys called Bliplace are freshly made and headed to Burning Man. They’re pretty much just a sound reactive toy, but [Tanjent] decided to go pretty in depth in the design. They are 1″ wide octagons with 3 super bright LEDs and a microphone. The microphone is sampled at 4400 hz by the ATTiny25v and the signal is split into high and low frequency streams. The center LED is low frequency, the sides are the high. They can run a full week on a battery. He’ll be handing out 350 of them at Burning Man, then releasing the source code, boards, and kits after that.
Current fluorescent lamps are great for lighting large areas using very few Watts; however, LEDs are far more efficient at producing light and have less of an impact upon the environment considering there is no mercury within them. [Andrew] sent in his team’s LED florescent bulb. The first revision utilized 87 LEDs, but to increase output the second revision uses 210. The assembly can’t actually be placed in current fluorescent lamp ballasts and must use a 12 volt 1 amp power supply, but perhaps future versions will correct for this. Another problem is the relatively small viewing angle, and while there is a diffuser, we’re wondering if they have any other ideas to spread the light and adjust for the color temperature without reducing output? We wonder how it compares to some of the commercially available LED florescent lamps.
[Dave Vondle] from IDEO Labs sent in the large LED pixel wall he built using BlinkM modules, an Arduino, and Flash to control it. The overall result is a blindingly bright, large, public display for people to interact with. The best part about the project is that [Dave Vondle] documents everything; from hardware to schematics to source code. Unfortunately, he was forced to remove the wall due to construction, but since every part of the project is open source, it lends itself to be easily recreated. I’m sure we’d all like to see a wireless controller hookup to play pong on the streets of Chicago.
