Voice Controlled RGB LEDs Go Big

October 2, 2020 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

When we see RGB LEDs used in a project, they’re often used more for aesthetic purposes than as a practical source of light. It’s an easy way to throw some color around, but certainly not the sort of thing you’d try to light up anything larger than a desk with. Apparently nobody explained the rules to [Brian Harms] before he built Light[s]well.

Believe it or not, this supersized light installation doesn’t use any exotic hardware you aren’t already familiar with. Fundamentally, what we’re looking at is a WiFi enabled Arduino MKR1000 driving strips of NeoPixel LEDs. It’s just on a far larger scale than we’re used to, with a massive 4 x 8 aluminum extrusion frame suspended over the living room.

Onto that frame, [Brian] has mounted an undulating diffuser made of 74 pieces of laser-cut cardstock. Invoking ideas of waves or clouds, the light looks like its of natural or even biological origin while at the same time having a distinctively otherworldly quality to it.

The effect is even more pronounced when the RGB LEDs kick in, thanks to the smooth transitions between colors. In the video after the break, you can see Light[s]well work its way from bright white to an animated rainbow. As an added touch, he added Alexa voice control through Arduino’s IoT Cloud service.

While LED home lighting is increasingly becoming the norm, projects like Light[s]well remind us that we aren’t really embracing the possibilities offered by the technology. The industry has tried so hard to make LEDs fit into the traditional role of incandescent bulbs, but perhaps its time to rethink things.

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Shadow Lamp Moves Delibrately Slowly

October 2, 2020 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

Inspired by the famous lava lamp, [Mojoptix] wanted to build a creation of his own with a similarly organic, changing lighting effect. However, rather than flowing heated wax, he created a lamp with pseudo-random effects his own way.

The lamp itself is built around a shadow-puppet concept, using a pair of rotating apetures that [Mojoptix] 3D printed. The apetures turn, one in front of the other, and are lit from behind by an IKEA LED light. As the apetures rotate, they present a slowly varying path for the light from the LED, which is projected onto a paper screen placed in in front of the assembly. To generate the long-period rotation, the rotating assembly is turned by the minute hand of a common clock movement. It’s a great way to get a slow-rotating motor and gearbox setup on the cheap, as long as your torque requirements are absolutely miniscule.

It’s a neat way to produce a slowly-varying lighting effect; we’ve featured other discussions on the topic before, too. Video after the break.

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Circuit Board Origami Puts You Face-to-Face With Low-Poly Electronics

September 21, 2020 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

Paper craft has been around almost as long as paper itself. It’s fun to mimic paper craft and origami with low-poly 3D prints, and [Stephen Hawes] wondered whether it could be done with copper-clad PCBs. Two years after the question arose, we have the answer in the form of a fantastical mask with light-up eyes. Check it out in the video below.

[Stephen] started with a model (Update: [kongorilla]’s 2012 low poly mask model from back in 2012 was the starting point for this hack) from the papercraft program Pepakura Designer, then milled out dozens of boards. Only a few of them support circuitry, but it was still quite the time-consuming process. The ATmega32U4 on the forehead along with the fold-traversing circuitry serve to light up the WS2812B eyes. Power runs up the copper tube, which doubles as a handy mounting rod to connect to the 3D printed base.

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Falcon 9 Lamp Is Touching Down In The Living Room

September 18, 2020 by Tom Nardi 5 Comments

Many of us have been inspired by the videos of the Falcon 9 booster, tall as an office building, riding a pillar of flame down to a pinpoint landing at Kennedy Space Center or on one of SpaceX’s floating landing pads in the ocean. It’s not often that we get to see science fiction fantasy become reality on such a short timescale, and while they might not be sold on the practicality of reusable rockets, even the most skeptical of observers have to admit it’s an incredible feat of engineering.

Though it can’t quite compare to the real thing, this 1:60 scale Falcon 9 lamp by [Sir Michael II] promises to bring a little of that excitement home every time you flick on the light. Combining a scratch built model of the reusable booster with some RGB LEDs, the hovering tableau recreates the tense final seconds before the towering rocket comes to a rest on its deployable landing legs. We imagine those last moments must seem like an eternity for the SpaceX engineers watching from home as well.

[Michael] walks readers through assembling the Falcon 9 model, which cleverly uses a 2 inch white PVC pipe as the fuselage. After all, why waste the time and material printing a long white cylinder when you can just buy one at the hardware store for a few bucks?

Dressed up with 3D printed details from Thingiverse user [twuelfing] and splashed with a bit of paint, it makes for a very convincing model. While the diameter of the pipe isn’t quite right for the claimed 1:60 scale, unless Elon Musk is coming over your place to hang out, we don’t think anyone will notice.

The rocket is attached to the pad with a piece of threaded steel rod, around which [Michael] has wrapped one meter of RGB LEDs controlled by an Arduino Uno. With some polyester fiber filler as a diffuser and a bit of code to get the LEDs flickering, he’s able to produce a realistic “flame” that looks to be coming from the Falcon 9’s center engine. While we admit it may not make a very good lamp in the traditional sense, it certainly gets extra points for style.

We’ve actually seen a similar trick used before to light up the engines of a LEGO Saturn V and Apollo Lunar Module. It’s amazing how realistic the effect can be, and we’d love to see it used more often. We’d also like to see more model rockets that actually levitate over their pads, but one step at a time.

Digital Cribbage Board Saves Scores, Marriage

September 16, 2020 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

When [ccooper] told his parents he was gonna start up his electronics habit again, the last thing he expected was to save his parents’ marriage in the process. But as soon as he dropped this news, they made a special request: build us something to replace the multi-purpose manual cribbage board. It’s too ambiguous and starts too many arguments.

Cribbage is a card game that involves scoring based on hands. Traditionally, the score is kept with pegs on a wooden board with two or three sets of 60 holes. To build a digital cribbage board, [ccooper] decided to represent the positions on a field made from chained-together RGBW matrices.

These four matrices are run by an Arduino Nano Every and will display one of three scoring schemes that the parents usually play. A set of eight AA batteries ensures that Mum and Dad can play out in bright daylight and still see the LEDs. You can see how the brightness rivals the sun in the demo after the break. The code and Gerber files for the custom board are there if you want to make one for yourself, or know of another marriage that needs saving.

Every game deserves tidy record-keeping. If you’re more the RPG type, check out this amazing stat tracker made of stacked-up FR4 boards.

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LED Art Reveals Itself In Very Slow Motion

September 15, 2020 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

Every bit of film or video you’ve ever seen is a mind trick, an optical illusion of continuous movement based on flashing 24 to 30 slightly different images into your eyes every second. The wetware between your ears can’t deal with all that information individually, so it convinces itself that you’re seeing smooth motion.

But what if you slow down time: dial things back to one frame every 100 seconds, or every 1,000? That’s the idea behind this slow-motion LED art display called, appropriately enough, “Continuum.” It’s the work of [Louis Beaudoin] and it was inspired by the original very-slow-motion movie player and the recent update we featured. But while those players featured e-paper displays for photorealistic images, “Continuum” takes a lower-resolution approach. The display is comprised of ~~four~~ nine HUB75 32×32 RGB LED displays, each with a 5-mm pitch. The resulting 96×96 pixel display fits nicely within an Ikea RIBBA picture frame.

The display is driven by a Teensy 4 and [Louis]’ custom-designed SmartLED Shield that plugs directly into the HUB75s. The rear of the frame is rimmed with APA102 LED strips for an Ambilight-style effect, and the front of the display has a frosted acrylic diffuser. It’s configured to show animated GIFs at anything from ~~1 frame per second~~ its original framerate to 1,000 ~~seconds per frame~~ times slower, the latter resulting in an image that looks static unless you revisit it sometime later. [Louis] takes full advantage of the Teensy’s processing power to smoothly transition between each pair of frames, and the whole effect is quite wonderful. The video below captures it as best it can, but we imagine this is something best seen in person.

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3D POV Display Has The Shakes

September 12, 2020 by Danie Conradie 6 Comments

Persistence of vision projects are a dime a dozen, but by adding a third dimension [Madaeon] succesfully created one to stand out from the crowd. Instead of waving around a single line of LEDs, he is moving a 2D grid of them vertically to create a volumetric POV display.

The display consists of oscillating 3D printed piston, powered by a small geared motor, on top of which sits a 8 x 8 RGB LED grid and diffusing film. The motor drives a cylindrical cam, which moves a piston that sits over it, while an optical end stop detects the bottom of the piston’s travel to keep the timing correct. [Madaeon] has not added his code to the project page, but the 3D files for the mechanics are available. The current version creates a lot of vibration, but he plans to improve it by borrowing one of [Karl Bugeja]’s ideas, and using flexible PCBs and magnets.

He also links another very cool volumetric display that he constructed a few years ago. It works by projecting images from a small DLP projector onto an oscillating piece of fabric, to created some surprisingly high definition images.

POV displays are good projects for learning, so if you want to build your own, take a look a simple POV business card, or this well-documented POV spinning top.