LED Hacks

1908 Articles

LED Push Buttons

January 29, 2009 by 39 Comments

led-button

[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]

Choreographed Christmas Lights

January 23, 2009 by 10 Comments

[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.

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Wireless BlinkM Control

January 10, 2009 by 5 Comments

blinkm

[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.

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Tiny Projector Teardown

January 4, 2009 by 10 Comments

projector

The team from Tech-On has taken the time to teardown two interesting microprojectors. The first model they tackled was the Optoma PK101. It’s based around a digital micromirror device (DMD) like those used in DLP. Separate high intensity red, green, and blue LEDs provide the light source. A fly-eye style lens reduces variations between images. They noted that both the LEDs and processors were tied directly to the chassis to dissipate heat.

The next projector was the 3M Co MPro110. It uses Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) technology. The light source is a single bright white LED. The projector seems to have more provisions for getting rid of heat than the previous one. The most interesting part was the resin polarizing beam splitter. It not only reflected specific polarizations, but also adjust the aspect ratio.

[via Make]

Game Boy Pocket Backlight

January 4, 2009 by 22 Comments

gameboy

[palmertech] and [Bibin] have both completed backlight projects for the Game Boy Pocket recently. The most difficult part of the transplant is carefully removing the reflective backing on the LCD. After a thorough cleaning, a diffuser and backlight panel were added. [palmertech] used a backlight salvaged from a DS, while [Bibin] built his own using LEDs. You can see his backlight in the video embedded below. There’s a disassembly video too.

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Working With VFDs

December 25, 2008 by 12 Comments

vfd

We love old display technology, like Nixie tubes, but they’re often difficult to work with because they require higher voltages than digital logic. Vacuum florescent displays (VFD) fall into this category. While not necessarily “old”, they are becoming far less common than LCDs. The main benefit of a VFD is that it actually produces light directly; it doesn’t require a backlight. You’ll find these displays on various players and appliances: CD, DVD, VCR, microwaves, stoves, car headunits, and others.

[Sprite_tm] had written off some VFDs, but recently revisited them with renewed interest. He started by testing what sort of voltage would be required to drive the display. It took 3V for the filament plus 15V to drive the grids. There are VFD controller chips available, but he wanted to get this working with what he had on hand. He had experience with older 40xx series logic, which can be powered by much higher voltages than 5V 74xx. His final schematic has three 4094 serial to parallel chips with an ATtiny2313 controller. A 5V power supply is dropped to 3V with diodes to drive the filament while a boost converter brings it up to 15V for the 4094s that switch the segments. While the code is specific to this display, it would be a great place to start your own project.

Giant LED Lamp

December 24, 2008 by 15 Comments

led

[guyfrom7up] must really really love LEDs. When he needed some lighting, which would obviously be LED powered, he chose to actually build a giant LED. Well, he didn’t actually build a giant functional LED, but rather an LED shaped diffuser for some high powered LEDs. He takes us through the process of first creating a wooden model, using that to create a mold, then forming the final diffuser.  The final product is very well done, and instantly identifiable by any geek.

[thanks Brian]