Color Your Workspace, Calm Your Mind

July 7, 2020 by Kristina Panos 5 Comments

Every day, it seems to get harder and harder to relax and unwind. A person can only take so many lava-hot showers before they start cutting into work time. Listening to music is a wonderful option, but it can be difficult to find something to listen to that’s soothing without being disruptive. So what else can we try? Oh yes, blinkenlights. Frosted, glowing blinkenlights that bathe the room in color. Ahhhh.

There’s something about those enclosures that completes these so well. [ChrisParkerTech] used Alder wood sprayed with clear coat, which gives them a delightfully clean mid-century look. We also dig the lack of ceiling and unfinished top edge, because it gives the leaking light a bit of infinity pool mystique.

Of course, these wouldn’t be much of a relaxation tool if you have to get up up from your couch, chair, or bean bag every time you want to adjust them. Each strip is connected to a Wemos D1 mini, so [Chris] can control them with his phone via WLED, or make Alexa do it. Check out the build video after the break.

If you really love LEDs, don’t leave home without them. Show the world how you feel with a stylish LED hat.

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Elegant Shoji Lamps From Your 3D Printer

July 6, 2020 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

The gorgeous Shoji-style lamps you’re seeing here aren’t made of wood or paper. Beyond the LEDs illuminating them from within, the lamps are completely 3D printed. There aren’t any fasteners or glue holding them together either, as creator [Dheera Venkatraman] used authentic Japanese wood joinery techniques to make their components fit together like a puzzle.

While we’re usually more taken with the electronic components of the projects that get sent our way, we have to admit that in this case, the enclosure is really the star of the show. [Dheera] has included a versatile mounting point where you could put anything from a cheap LED candle to a few WS2812B modules, but otherwise leaves the integration of electronic components as an exercise for the reader.

All of the components were designed in OpenSCAD, which means it should be relatively easy to add your own designs to the list of included panel types. Despite the colorful details, you won’t need a multi-material printer to run them off either. Everything you see here was printed on a Prusa i3 MK3S in PETG. Filament swaps and careful design were used to achieve the multiple colors visible on some of the more intricate panels.

If the timeless style of these Japanese lanterns has caught your eye, you’ll love this beautiful sunrise clock we covered last year.

Reviving A DOA Smart Bulb With Custom Firmware For Its ESP8266

July 5, 2020 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

There are some incredibly cheap WiFi smart bulbs on the market these days, but as is often the case, you tend to get what you pay for. When [Viktor] took delivery of his latest bargain basement bulb, the thing didn’t even work. So much for Quality Assurance. On the plus side, it was a great excuse to pop it open and replace the firmware.

For anyone wondering, [Viktor] never actually figured out why the bulb didn’t work. Its ESP8266-based control board was getting power, and data was getting spit out of the serial port when he connected it to the computer (although he never got the communications settings right to actually see what it was saying). But he also didn’t care much; once he confirmed that the hardware was good, he just uploaded the custom firmware he’d previously developed for another ESP8266 bulb.

Of course, it wasn’t quite that easy. The chances that both bulbs would have used the same GPIO pins to control the red, green, blue, and white LEDs were pretty slim. But after some testing and modifications to the code, he was able to fire them up. The other issue was a bit trickier, as it turned out the bulb’s flash chip was too small to hold his firmware’s web configuration pages. So he had to break out the hot air gun and replace the SPI flash chip with something a bit roomier. We suppose he could have just made smaller web pages… but where’s the fun in that?

Even with the chip swap, this looks a lot easier than building your own smart bulbs from scratch. With so many cheap ESP8266 bulbs on the market, it seems there’s never been a better time to code your own home lighting solution.

An RGB Backlight For The Nokia 5110 LCD

July 4, 2020 by Tom Nardi 13 Comments

Hardware hackers love the Nokia 5110 LCD. Or at least, they love the clones of it. You can pick up one of these panels for a couple bucks wherever electronic bits and bobs are sold, and integrating it into your project is a snap thanks to all the code and documentation floating around out there. But while it might be cheap and reliable, it’s not a terribly exciting component.

Which is perhaps why [Miguel Reis] thought he’d spruce it up a bit with an RGB backlight. While we’ll admit that this hack is mostly about looking cool, it’s not entirely without practical application. If your gadget experiences some kind of fault, having it flash the LCD bright red is sure to get somebody’s attention from across the room.

The board itself is very straightforward, with four MHPA1010RGBDT RGB LEDs and a couple of passives to keep them happy. The Nokia 5110 LCD module just pops right on, and beyond the extra pins added for the three LED colors, gets wired up the same as before. The backlight LEDs just need a few spare GPIO pins on your microcontroller to drive them, and away you go.

[Miguel] is currently selling his RGB version of this iconic LCD on Tindie for only a couple dollars more than the standard version, so it looks like a pretty cheap way to add a little bling to your next project. (Tindie is owned by Supplyframe, which also owns Hackaday. But they didn’t put us up to adding this link.)

Travel Globe Spins You Around Memory Lane

July 4, 2020 by Sven Gregori 2 Comments

We all have our own preferences when it comes to travel souvenirs — that little something that brings back the memories and feelings of a past holiday every time we look at it, whether it’s the cliché fridge magnet, some local speciality, or just the collection of photos we took. But then there are those journeys that can’t be summarized into a single item and may require a bit more creativity. For [Jonathan], it was last year’s trip around the world that took him and [Maria] to locations all over Europe, Asia, and Oceania, and he found a great way to remember it: an interactive, laser-cut travel globe displaying all the places they went to.

Building a sphere is of course a bit tricky with a laser cutter, so [Jonathan] went for the icosahedron shaped Dymaxion map projection (think of a large d20 dice) and burnt the world onto it. Inside the globe is an ESP8266, an MPU-6050 IMU, and a bunch of LEDs to light up the travel locations using the WLED library. Taking the data from the IMU, he customized the WLED library to determine which way the globe is positioned, and highlights the top-facing location in a different color.

While that would already make a nice souvenir on its own, [Jonathan] didn’t stop here. Using Google’s My Maps service, which lets you create custom maps with own points of interest and have for example photos attached to them, the ESP8266 hosts the travel map also as a web page. Feeding the IMU data to the JavaScript code that’s handling the map API, the globe itself now doubles as an input device to control the virtual map. So whenever the globe is physically rotated to highlight a certain location, the web page’s map is focused to that same location and shows randomly the pictures they have taken there. Check out the video below to see it all in action.

This is a great way to reminisce about a memorable journey even years down the road, and while it may not be flexible to extend, it seems like the kind of trip that deserves a standalone device anyway. Plus, the Dymaxion map is definitely an interesting projection — so here’a a foldable one, just because. And If you like tracking things on a globe, here’s one that shows the location of the ISS.

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Mini Library For Kids Gets Blinky Lights And Solar Upgrade

June 28, 2020 by Donald Papp 1 Comment

Reading is big in Québec, and [pepelepoisson]’s young children have access to a free mini library nook that had seen better days and was in dire need of maintenance and refurbishing. In the process of repairing and repainting the little outdoor book nook, he took the opportunity to install a few experimental upgrades (link in French, English translation here.)

The mini library pods are called Croque-Livres, part of a program of free little book nooks for children across Québec (the name is a bit tricky to translate into English, but think of it as “snack shack, but for books” because books are things to be happily devoured.)

After sanding and repairs and a few coats of new paint, the Croque-Livres was enhanced with a strip of WS2812B LEDs, rechargeable battery with solar panel, magnet and reed switch as door sensor, and a 3.3 V Arduino to drive it all. [pepelepoisson]’s GitHub repository for the project contains the code and CAD files for the 3D printed pieces.

The WS2812B LED strip technically requires 5 V, but as [pepelepoisson] found in his earlier project Stecchino, the LED strip works fine when driven directly from a 3.7 V lithium-polymer cell. It’s not until around 3 V that it starts to get unreliable, so a single 3.7 V cell powers everything nicely.

When the door is opened, the LED strip lights up with a brief animation, then displays the battery voltage as a bar graph. After that, the number of times the door as been opened is shown on the LED strip in binary. It’s highly visual, interactive, and there’s even a small cheat sheet explaining how binary works for anyone interested in translating the light pattern into a number. How well does it all hold up? So far so good, but it’s an experiment that doesn’t interfere at all with the operation of the little box, so it’s all good fun.

Get The Party Started With A Mesh WiFi Light Show

June 26, 2020 by Sven Gregori 1 Comment

Wildly blinking LEDs may not be the ideal lighting for the average office environment, but they’ll surely spice up any party. And since a party without music is just a meeting, having both synced up is a great way to set the mood. Sure, you could simply roll out your standard LED strip instead, but that gets a bit boring, and also a bit tricky if you want to light up several places the same way. [Gerrit] might have built the perfect solution though, with his (mu)sic (R)eactive (Li)ghts, or muRLi, which are a set of individual lights that synchronize a programmable pattern over WiFi.

The system consists of muRLi itself as the base station that defines and sends the light pattern through WebSockets, and several muRLi Nodes that house a set of WS2812B LEDs to receive and display it. Both are built around a Wemos D1 Mini configured to set up a WiFi mesh network, and depending what’s in reach, the nodes connect either to the base station or other nodes, giving the system definitely enough reach for any location size. The music is picked up by a MAX4466-amplified microphone inside the base station — adding some more flexibility to positioning the system — and analyzed for volume and audio spectrum, which is also shown on an OLED.

The best part however is how the light patterns are programmed. Instead of hard-coding it into the firmware, [Gerrit] went for a modular approach with little ROM cartridges to plug into the muRLi base station. The cartridge itself contains just an I2C EEPROM, storing JavaScript code that is interpreted by the firmware using mJS. The scripts have access to the analyzed audio data and amount of LEDs within the network, and can dynamically generate the patterns as needed that way. Everything is neatly housed in 3D-printed enclosures, with all the design and source files available on the project’s GitHub page — but see for yourself in the video after the break.

If you don’t care about the wireless part but enjoy light synced up with music, have a look at a plain MIDI solution for that. As for [Gerrit], we’re definitely looking forward to seeing his next endeavor one day, since we also enjoyed his last one.

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