Open Source Pizza Compass Will Show You The Way

April 28, 2021 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

In Pirates of the Caribbean, Captain Jack Sparrow has an enchanted compass that points to what the holder wants most in life. The Pizza Compass created by [Joe Grand] is basically the same thing, except it’s powered by a Particle Boron instead of a voodoo spell. Though depending on who’s holding the thing, we imagine they’d even point in the same direction.

[Joe] was tasked by Wired to design and produce the Pizza Compass in three weeks, a process which was documented in the video below. Being the Badgelife luminary that he is, the final product looks far more attractive than it has any business being. In addition to the Particle Boron that slots in on the back of the handheld PCB, there’s a GlobalTop PA6H GPS module, a LSM303DLHC compass, and eight NeoPixels that correspond to the points on the silkscreen compass.

Using the device is simple, just press the button and then walk around trying to keep the top-most LED lit. Behind the scenes, the Boron is pulling down the coordinates of the closest pizza place as reported by Google’s API, and comparing that to the user’s current GPS location. In practice that means the Pizza Compass isn’t concerned with nuances like streets or buildings, so its up to the user to figure out how best to stay on the desired heading. So rather than just following some turn-by-turn directions, there’s some proper navigation involved if you want that fresh slice.

If you don’t like pizza, you could reprogram the compass to point to whatever quest-worthy resource you wish. As explained at the end of the video, [Joe] wanted this to be an open source project so it could easily be adapted for different tasks by the community. Though honestly, it’s pretty weird if you don’t like pizza.

We’ve actually covered a very similar device in the past that would point the user to the closest White Castle or Five Guys, but with all due respect to that project, the Pizza Compass is in another league. When you’ve got the talent and experience of [Joe Grand] on the team, even the most mundane of gadgets ends up looking like a piece of art.

Continue reading “Open Source Pizza Compass Will Show You The Way” →

LED Hack Teaches DJI Mini 2 Drone New Tricks

April 20, 2021 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

Despite its diminutive proportions, the thrust to weight ratio of the DJI Mini 2 is high enough that it can carry a considerable amount of baggage. So it’s no surprise that there’s a cottage industry of remotely controlled payload releases that can be bolted onto the bottom of this popular quadcopter. But [tterev3] wanted something that would integrate better with DJI’s software instead of relying on a separate transmitter.

As explained in the video below, his solution was to tap into the signals that control the RGB LED on the front of the drone. Since the user can change the color of the LED at any time with the official DJI smartphone application, decoding this signal to determine which color had been selected is like adding several new channels to the transmitter. In this case [tterev3] just needed to decode a single color to use as a “drop” signal, but it’s not hard to imagine how this concept could be expanded to trigger several different actions with a few more lines of code.

[tterev3] wrote some software to decode the 48 bits of data being sent to the LED with a PIC18F26K40 microcontroller, which in turn uses an L9110H H-Bridge to control a tiny gear motor. To get feedback, he’s using a small magnet glued to the release arm and a Hall-effect sensor.

Concerned about how much power he could realistically pull from a connection that was intended for an LED, he gave the release its own battery that is slowly charged while the drone is running. You could argue that since the motor only needs to fire up once to drop the payload, [tterev3] probably could have gotten away with not recharging it at all during the flight. But as with the ability to decode additional color signals, the techniques being demonstrated here hold a lot of promise for future development.

Folks have been strapping additional hardware to commercial quadcopters for years, but modifications like this one that actually let the craft release its payload and fly away hold particular promise for environmental monitoring and building mesh communication networks.

Continue reading “LED Hack Teaches DJI Mini 2 Drone New Tricks” →

8-Bit Computer Addresses LEDs

April 19, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 2 Comments

Homebrew 8-bit computers tend to have fairly limited displays, often one or more seven-segment displays and an array of LEDs to show the values of RAM or perhaps some other states of the computer. [Duncan] is in the process of building just such an computer, but wondered if there was a way to create a more visually appealing display while still keeping the computer true to its 8-bit roots. With some interesting TTL logic he was able to create this addressable RGB LED display to some remarkable results.

The array works by controlling the WS2812B LED strips with a specific timing cycle which was pioneered by [Tim] for a different project. [Tim] was able to perform this timing cycle with some simple Assembly code, which means that [Duncan] could convert that code into TTL gate logic relatively easily. Using 74LS02 NOR chips gets the job done as far as timing goes, and the pulses are then fed into a shift register and support logic which then creates the signal for the LED strips.

When everything is said and done, [Duncan] has a fully addressable 16×16 RGB LED array as a display for his 8-bit computer without violating any of his design principles and keeping everything to discrete TTL logic chips and a stick of RAM. It’s a unique method of display that might go along really well with any other homebrew computer like this one that’s also built with 74LS chips.

Shapeshifting Streetlights Are The Future We Want To Live In

April 18, 2021 by Lewin Day 32 Comments

Regular streetlights are all well and good, bathing us in the glow of their sodium, or more increasingly LED, lamps. They’re mostly rigid metal contraptions installed primarily for public safety purposes. They could be so much more, however, as the Bloomlight demonstrates.

The light consists of a flexible main stem, which can be pulled in different directions by six steel cables controlled by stepper motors. At the top, it has a shroud made of wooden slats and fabric that can bloom like a flower around its central lamp, thanks to a 3D printed mechanism. LIDAR is used to detect approaching humans, at which point the Bloomlight leans over towards them and begins to bloom open, showering them with light.

It’s a beautiful art piece from the Dutch design firm [Vouw], and one we’d love to see in person. The design reminds of this useful tentacle design. With that said, it could grow emotionally exhausting having to repeatedly ignore plaintively waving streetlights that crave human attention as you walk on through the night. Anthropomorphizing anything is usually a double edged sword.

Perhaps the neatest streetlight hack we’ve seen is way back from 2013 – using a laser diode to shut off a streetlight from a distance. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Shapeshifting Streetlights Are The Future We Want To Live In” →

Replacing An ESP8266 Clone With The Real Thing

April 17, 2021 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

The first time [konbaasiang] ordered some ceiling LED lights from Tuya, he was pleased to find they contained an ESP-12F that could easily be flashed with a different firmware. So when he ordered 30 more of them at a cost of nearly $900 USD, you can understand his frustration to find that the popular WiFi-enabled microcontroller had been swapped out for a pin-compatible clone that Tuya developed called the WB3L.

Some people would have just chalked this one up to bad luck and used the Tuya-supplied software to control their new lights, but not [konbaasiang]. Since the new chip was outwardly identical to the ESP8266, he decided to take the nuclear option and replace them with the genuine article. With a comfortable spot to work from and a nice microscope, he started on his desoldering journey.

Now it would have been nice if he could have just dropped in a real ESP-12F and called it a day, but naturally, it ended up being a bit more complex than that. The WB3L apparently doesn’t need external pull up and pull down resistors, but [konbaasiang] needed them for the swap to work. He could have come up with some kind of custom adapter PCB, but to keep things simple he decided to run a pair of through hole resistors across the top of the ESP-12F for GPIO 1/2, and use a gingerly placed SMD resistor to hold down GPIO 15.

[konbaasiang] reports that all 30 of the lights survived the transplant and are now running his own homebrew firmware. While this story had a happy ending, it’s still a cautionary tale. With a growing trend towards replacing the venerable ESP8266 with cheaper and less hacker-friendly silicon, buying IoT hardware with the intent to replace its firmware is likely to get riskier in the near future.

MicroLEDs: Lighting The Way To A Solid OLED Competitor

April 12, 2021 by Maya Posch 59 Comments

We’re accustomed to seeing giant LED-powered screens in sports venues and outdoor displays. What would it take to bring this same technology into your living room? Very, very tiny LEDs. MicroLEDs.

MicroLED screens have been rumored to be around the corner for almost a decade now, which means that the time is almost right for them to actually become a reality. And certainly display technology has come a long way from the early cathode-ray tube (CRT) technology that powered the television and the home computer revolution. In the late 1990s, liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology became a feasible replacement for CRTs, offering a thin, distortion-free image with pixel-perfect image reproduction. LCDs also allowed for displays to be put in many new places, in addition to finally having that wall-mounted television.

Since that time, LCD’s flaws have become a sticking point compared to CRTs. The nice features of CRTs such as very fast response time, deep blacks and zero color shift, no matter the angle, have led to a wide variety of LCD technologies to recapture some of those features. Plasma displays seemed promising for big screens for a while, but organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have taken over and still-in-development technologies like SED and FED off the table.

While OLED is very good in terms of image quality, its flaws including burn-in and uneven wear of the different organic dyes responsible for the colors. MicroLEDs hope to capitalize on OLED’s weaknesses by bringing brighter screens with no burn-in using inorganic LED technology, just very, very small.

So what does it take to scale a standard semiconductor LED down to the size of a pixel, and when can one expect to buy MicroLED displays? Let’s take a look. Continue reading “MicroLEDs: Lighting The Way To A Solid OLED Competitor” →

LED Brightness Adjustment Uses Itself As Sensor

April 11, 2021 by Donald Papp 16 Comments

This is a story about a successful system that nevertheless failed to make the cut. An experimental LED brightness adjustment is something [Mitxela] explored in a project for a high-precision clock; one that shows time down to the nearest millisecond, and won’t flicker or otherwise look weird when photographed with a high-speed camera. To pull this off means reinventing many things about a clock display, including how to handle brightness adjustment elegantly. Now, to be clear, the brightness adjustment idea described here is something that did not end up being used, but it’s interesting enough that [Mitxela] wrote it up and we’re very glad he did.

The idea was to have a smooth and seamless automatic brightness adjustment, ideally with no added components. Since LEDs can be used as light sensors, [Mitxela] saw an opportunity to use elements of the clock displays themselves as sensors. This is how it works: a charge in the p-n junction that makes up an LED will decay at a rate proportional to the amount of light hitting the junction. By measuring the speed of this decay, it’s therefore possible to tell how much light is hitting the LED. It’s effective and elegant, but there are a few practical issues to deal with.

The first failed idea was to employ as sensors the unused decimal points in the seven-segment LED modules, but that turned out to have issues. One was the common-cathode wiring of the display modules; this makes them very convenient to drive as displays, but made using the decimal point as a light sensor impractical. The other issue was that the built-in diffuser that makes the displays easier to read absorbs a lot of ambient light. A much better option was to use the LEDs in the colon separators between digits, since they’re independent. Naturally they still have to light up in addition to being used as sensors, but [Mitxela] made a successful prototype by performing the necessary measurements in between the LEDs being driven by PWM.

Despite how clever and efficient the solution was, in the end what sank it was the fact that the LEDs just don’t do a very good job of sensing ambient light for this purpose. The LEDs are simply too directional. Even after sanding away the top (lens) part of the LEDs, they still had a very narrow field of view. As [Mitxela] describes it, tilting the clock towards the ceiling could send it to full brightness, and the shadow of one’s head falling across the clock would plummet it into “night mode” dimness. In short, it responded to what was directly in front of it, rather than the ambient light level as a whole.

It’s a reminder that sometimes a solution simply won’t tick all the right boxes, and it can happen for unexpected reasons. Still, LEDs are versatile things. Not only can they sense light, but as the name implies they’re also diodes. As diodes can be used as temperature sensors that means LEDs can as well.