Animated LED Eyes For Halloween

October 3, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

[Matt Daughtrey] sent us this sweet little project he’s doing for Halloween. He’s building some animated LED eyes. He says that the whole thing is 3 individual LMDriver platforms, another project he’s working on. There isn’t any info available about that, but he does expand a little. He states that each display module uses an Atmega169 with some heavy multiplexing. The eyes really don’t look that impressive sitting on the bench, but watch the video to see how cool they really are.

We noticed that the back of the boards appear to have http://www.embeddedether.net on them. Unfortunately that site seems to have been grabbed by a domain squatter.

A Remote Controlled RGB Light Bulb Lamp

September 28, 2008 by Jason Rollette 9 Comments

RGB just got a lot brighter by using 3x60Watt flood lights instead of an LED. The bulbs are driven via TRIACs and the whole thing uses a remote control to change the levels of the three bulbs. It is also able to store these levels for later recall. The IR receiver was taken from a dead TV set along with its remote control, or a universal remote set to a Phillips TV can be used. The source code and schematic for this project are available.

Email Notification Via An RGB LED

September 28, 2008 by Jason Rollette 15 Comments

This project provides LED feedback when an email is received. It uses a 4d-micro-USB module from Dontronics to interface serially and provide power to a Picaxe 08M. The PIC can control color and brightness of a RGB LED. The feedback is given by seven colors of the LED. The code is python script and picaxe basic, which he’s posted.

Accelerometer Controlled Pong

September 23, 2008 by Ian 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYVgXYtxk4E]

[Perry’s] awesome AcceLED Pong project gives new life to a classic game by adding acceleration-based control. The pong paddles are moved by tilting the circuit left or right. Motion is measured by an ADXL203 dual axis accelerometer, and an ATMEGA32 microcontroller converts acceleration into ball and paddle movement. The game display is a three-color SparkFun 8×8 LED matrix with serial interface.

[Perry] also used a similar setup to make a USB LED spectrum analyzer fed by the Linux XMMS media player.

Laser POV Projector

September 23, 2008 by Jason Rollette 10 Comments

[shakirfm] sent us this LED persistence of vision (POV) laser projector that can display dot matrix style text. The laser projector contains a rotating mirror assembly and 5 lasers. We’ve covered other POV projectors,but this one is a bit different. The mirror assembly rotates using two cooling fans. Controlling on/off times of the lasers along with the mirror speed, it is able to project 8×5 dot matrix ASCII text onto a surface.
Continue reading “Laser POV Projector” →

Boston LED Sweatshirt Arrestee Interviewed

September 19, 2008 by Eliot 43 Comments

In today’s episode of Boing Boing tv, [Xeni] interviews [Star Simpson]. She was arrested a year ago at Boston’s Logan airport for wearing a sweatshirt with a breadboard and some LEDs attached. With a collective groan, we watched this event unfold just months after Boston was held captive by Mooninites. After many court dates, [Star] is being forced to apologize and perform community service. She has since left MIT, disappointed with their nonexistent support, and left Boston entirely. Watch the interview for her side of the story. She’s posted how to recreate the sweatshirt.

LED Random Blinking Mood Lighting

September 15, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

What is it about pseudo random flashing LEDs that make us go gaga? We don’t know, but there’s definitely something there. [seligtobiason] has this obsession too. After seeing several more complicated projects, he created this elegant, simple, and cheap piece of art. The entire thing is pretty much just some flashing LEDs, some resistors, and a power supply. It really isn’t anything groundbreaking, but the effort and cost involved are tiny compared to some other similar projects. sure, it doesn’t synchronize over time based on input like the firefly project. But for a quick cheap project, the results are quite nice.

We would put one in our home, right next to the node blinky.