RGBike POV

June 15, 2009 by Eliot 7 Comments

rgbike_pov

[Hazard] wanted a full color POV display for his bike wheel. Adafruit’s SpokePOV is single color and Monkeylectric’s original version didn’t display images. He also balked at the cost and decided to manufacture his own version. It uses 16 RGB LEDs on a single layer board he manufactured himself. It’s an entirely through-hole design to make assembly easy. It uses a hall effect sensor to synchronize the image display. The two main components are an ATmega328p microcontroller, which should make it Arduino compatible, and a TLC5940 PWM LED driver. It’s a very well documented build and certainly a good looking effect.

[via adafruit]

Persistence Of Vision Propeller Clock

June 13, 2009 by Gerrit Coetzee 12 Comments

[Jon Stanley] has a nice write up on a POV propellor clock powered by a PIC microcontroller. He improved on the original design by [Bob Blick]. Jon tried a few different methods of powering the spinning circuit, some of which could be handy for other projects. As a double plus good bonus, schematics and code are all linked on the site. This clock would look nice and sinister sitting on any mad scientist’s dresser.

MIDI Sequencer/controller

June 13, 2009 by Gerrit Coetzee 12 Comments

lenonluks

Reader, [Lennon Luks] made a really slick MIDI sequencer/controller for his senior design project while studying at Western Carolina University. It has a grid of 64 LED buttons, 8 knobs, and a display with navigation buttons that allow him to sequence tracks with or without a computer. The controller is based off an ATmega644 and is programmed in C. [Lennon] clearly explains the inner workings of the project in detail on his website and has included a good number of pictures. [Lennon] made a nice video of the project which can be seen after the jump.

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LED Bottle Wall

June 13, 2009 by Eliot 10 Comments

[vimeo 5116519]

Here are two new projects from [Alex Beim] at Tangible Interactions. The video above is the bottle wall with a controllable LED behind each bottle. Embedded below is the 7×5 pixel Rainbow Box. He’s planning on writing a Quartz Composer patch to actively drive the display.

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RGBike POV

June 11, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 13 Comments

FIR7XMRFVRRH5S0.MEDIUM (Custom)

[Hazard] is designing this open source POV system for bikes. With the recent release of Monkey Electric’s m464q, [Hazard] was inspired. He found the price tag of roughly $2,000 to be way too much though. He is designing his own and taking us along for the trip. He hasn’t quite reached the Monkey Electric level of features, but he does have image display and simple animation. He encourages others to join him in improving the design. He notes that the image on the back side of the wheel is mirrored, so text would be backwards. Maybe he can pick some tips up from this old project.

Simple Computer Controlled Lights

June 8, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 33 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rf5zs7VEFM]

As many of you have mentioned, there are a lot of projects that are built with their own microprocessors, and are simply overkill. Here’s a reminder that we can do some pretty fun stuff light synchronized light shows without going overboard. This light show is controlled directly via the printer port on a computer. Sure you can’t un plug it and run it free standing, but you can build it for roughly $20.

Table For Electronic Dreams

May 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

table

The table for electronic dreams is an interactive table that is sensitive to electric activity. Though it looks similar to the table built by EMSL, this one lights up based on electromagnetic fields. You can get the schematics and such from the instructable, but there is also a video located at the bottom of the project’s home page. It would be really cool if the effect could be localized more.