[xander] built this LED valentine for his loved one. It’s interesting because he used Pyralux, a flexible circuit board material from DuPont. He describes the consistency as “tough plastic tissue-paper”, but had no trouble using standard toner transfer etching. It has an ATtiny45 microcontroller that pulses the 16 LEDs at an approximation of his heart beat. To avoid soldering a bunch of surface mount resistors, he used two constant current shift registers.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-HY8a9cCvI]
Here is a cool little toy, an LED matchstick. We don’t really know what purpose it serves, but [dhananjaygadre] did a pretty good job of reproducing the effect. The light is controlled by a microprocessor to emulate the flickering of a flame. It holds a charge for a short while, staying lit for an amount of time comparable to a match. To turn it on, you even “strike” it on a match box filled with magnets.
SparkFun has been selling button pad parts for some time and we used them in our RGB door lock project. A excellent part, but you needed to implement your own interface to use the boards. SparkFun has just released two additional versions to make it easier on builders. The first is their Button Pad Controller USB. It has a 4×4 grid of buttons lit by RGB LEDs and a USB interface. This board can be expanded using the Button Pad Controller SPI. The SPI bus means it should be easy to add the button pad to embedded projects. This newest release puts you much closer to building your own RGB monome clone or other custom controller than ever before. The unit pictured above is their own project and they have no plans on selling anything like it.
[flickr video=3252983302]
We don’t want your brains to explode, so just trust us that this is a truly one sided circuit. Being a mobius strip means that this circuit has uber geek bragging rights. Beware, your friends who have never heard of a mobius strip will argue until they are blue in the face that there are two sides to it. The circuit they chose was fairly appropriate, an LED “chaser”.
[pros] has come up with a very elegant way of making lighted buttons (translated). Using a bunch of small push buttons harvested from old CD players, he rigged this unique way of mounting LEDs. Each LED has two buttons under it. They are wired in parallel, so if either of them is pushed, the button works. The LED isn’t actually soldered where it passes through the board. The anode and cathode are bent around and soldered to allow the LED a little bit of travel. There’s a good picture of how he did this on the site. The rest of the details might be hard to decipher though, it looks to be in dutch.
[thanks Tom]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cj-morKHPQ]
We’ve covered a couple of different ways of doing choreographed Christmas lights. The most basic being sound activated ones made from speakers, then the parallax controlled ones. This one uses the parallax microcontroller as well, but [prabbit22m] seems to have put some more effort into the construction and enclosure. The lights are all LED this time around and there are 18 outlets that can be individually controlled in a nice, safe enclosure. The choreography was done well too. The capabilities video is pretty impressive, it looks like he has managed to do some fading in and out. You can see it after the break.
[John] has been working with several BlinkM RGB devices. He’s created a controller to talk to each of the BlinkMs wirelessly and change their behavior. The core is an old relay tester box used to test telephone circuits. Each of its four knobs are connected to the analog inputs on the Arduino. The signal is transmitted using RFlink devices. Each BlinkM is paired with an ATmega168 and receiver. The control box also has a switch to send the same signal to all of the devices at the same time. The transmit and receive code are available on his site. You can find a video of it embedded below.
