Happy Halloween! I’m in the mood for an extra, and I’ve got some stuff that’s been turning to zombies from the tipline.
Pictured above is a nice simple LED pumpkin sent in by [John]- perfect for the hacker with less than stellar art skills.
Let’s not forget [mastershake]s Hack-A-Day pumpkin from last year. Where’s the THAD pumpkin you promised? [Wolfgang] sent in these mini pumpkin bots – they look like toys, but they’re made from XBox parts and radio control cars.
Last year Max sent in his talking Halloween basket. (I always wanted to strap that voice module to a co-workers chair…)
[Brandon] built a budget (~$150) guitar hero controller out of a Gibson Epoch guitar from target.
This scanner cam has been around for a while, but I admire how he keeps fine tuning and tweaking the design. Thanks to [Loopymind] for passing it along.
I keep getting emails telling me that Google Earth has a flight simulator. Yes. We all know about it.
LED Hacks1938 Articles
Fiber Optic Flash Ring
Ring lights that surround the lens are generally used for macro photography – they’re not cheap, but they’re one of the few ways to get shadowless photos. This fiber optic flash diffuser is based on the same ideas of this one. Rather than use a few large optic strands, [Joris] is using many, many more to decrease shadows as much as possible. His previous efforts are even more interesting. He built a LED version – with serial connected LEDs and a step up switching power supply to drive them. Then he moved on to cold cathode fluorescent before moving onto the fiber optics.
Fnordlicht: RGB Mixing LED Light
While [Will] goes and hides in his offshore datashelter, Hack-A-Day is happy to welcome back our veteran foreign correspondent [fbz]. She promises future posts will have far less ‘German by example’. -[Eliot]
The Fnordlicht is a color mixing LED platform with free hardware schematics and open source firmware initially started by [fd0]. The system is dynamically controllable (via RS-485) and can also work as a standalone with pre-loaded color mixing. I have one of these soldered up and working at home; the circuits come in a stack of three boards with an optional serial level shifter board add-on. There are project pages in German about the Fnordlicht as well, which include some photos of the first prototype. Full kits (“Fnordlicht Bausatz” means “Fnordlicht kit”) and printed circuit boards (“Fnordlicht Platinensatz ohne Bauteile” means “Fnordlicht circuit board set without parts”) can be purchased from their shop, but be sure to ask them first about shipping prices to your location. I love this project, I fire it up and stick it in a corner of my hack room to add some color-changing atmosphere.
A while ago [Eliot] covered the MoMolight, a color changing led project controlled by the colors playing on your monitor.
Thinkpad Style Keyboard Light
[Sprite_tm] keeps coming up with nice work. This time he sent in his thinkpad style keyboard LED lighting solution for his toughbook. I know, you’re thinking… ‘it’s a LED…’ He used an ATtiny13 to monitor the caps lock LED. If it’s operated two times in succession, the LED is turned on and off. Nice, clean and effective.
[By the way, Part 2 of my diy projector how-to is up on engadget. Look for part 3 later Tuesday.]
MIT Disco LED Dance Floor
Sure you know that Disco Stu from the simpsons has got all the moves, but what if you don’t and want to kick it like travolta? then there’s only one option: head up to MIT and check out their LED Disco Dance Floor. This thing is comprimised of 1,536 LEDs made by 20,000 hand soldered connections. that’s a lot of work. it can produce 4,096 colors, can be controlled through XMMS, handles 30fps, and the best part is that it’s 128 square feet. Yes. It’s a very impressive dance floor that has insane capability. there is a log kept which is very detailed and explains the process and how it became a technical nightmare. they made custom PCB controllers to use it and soldered day and night to complete it for a dance they were having. in the end it was pulled off and quite successfully. they also have an “epilogue” telling what changes they made after the dance to improve it. that’s MIT for ya.
thanks to everyone who sent this in.
Led Video Cube Project
this is the hotness, over 1,000 leds make a 3d cube which shows severely low-res video.
this project is an exercise in representing the real world with leds arranged in a cube. using video as the input, the computer takes the image, reconstructs the data and displays it in the cube.
i’m going to drop them a note and see if i get a how-to cooking, this could actually make tv watchable again.
