Simple Trick For LEDs On Solderless Breadboards

June 9, 2019 by Ted Yapo 39 Comments

Sometimes the most useful hacks are also the simplest ones. A case in point is the LED and resistor assembly that [Skippy] recently posted on his blog. The idea is to solder up some pre-made indicators with integrated resistors to save space on the breadboard when prototyping — instead of four slots, you only use two per LED. This is about as easy a trick as you can imagine, but it has the hallmark of a classic hack: a high utility-to-work ratio.

The deluxe assembly uses a two-pin header as a base to plug into the breadboard. This, of course, could be optional since some breadboards have a memory for the widest pin previously inserted — using header pins may eventually make the slots a little flaky for smaller component leads. But, if you’re mostly using header pins in the breadboard anyway, this is a good way to avoid kinking the leads.

While there are LEDs available with integrated dropping resistors, building your own means you can use whatever LEDs you prefer — or simply have on hand — and adjust the resistor value for different voltages or to adjust the brightness. And for those of you who plug in LEDs without current-limiting resistors, we’re going to assume that you’ve thoroughly researched whatever is driving them and done the math to ensure they’re safe. Or not: they’re your LEDs after all.

We previously featured a no-solder breadboarding trick for SMD LEDs. What’s your favorite solderless breadboard hack? Let us know in the comments below.

Thanks to [Roboteernat] for the tip!

Animated Pixel Lamp Is A Must For Any Chiptuner’s Bedroom

June 2, 2019 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Lamps are quite often simple things, designed to light an area and perhaps add a touch of style to a room. Of course, it’s 2019 now, and we don’t need to settle for just that. We can have wildly colored animated lamps if we want to! (French Youtube link, embedded below.)

The lamp in question is the work of [Heliox], who knows her way around an LED or two (hundred). In this build, a string of WS2812 addressable RGB LEDs are hooked up to an Arduino Mega brain. The LEDs are fitted into a round lamp body, with a rectangular diffuser for each one. This creates an attractive pixellated effect and gives the animations a charming 8-bit quality. A thin outer shell is 3D printed in white plastic to further diffuse the light. The top of the lamp rotates an internal potentiometer to control mode selection. There’s also a brightness knob on the bottom if things get a touch too intense.

It’s a tidy build that uses 3D printing and addressable LEDs to quickly and easily create a lamp with a fun retro aesthetic. We could imagine this making a great piece for a hip sitcom apartment. We fully expect to see similar lamps on sale in the next couple of years. Video after the break.

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Make Your Own Old School LED Displays

May 31, 2019 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

We live in an era in which all manner of displays are cheap and readily available. A few dollars spent online can net you a two-line alphanumeric LCD, a graphical OLED screen, or all manner of other options. Years ago however, people made do with little monolithic LED devices. [sjm4306] wanted to recreate something similar, and got down to work (Youtube link, embedded below).

The resulting device uses 0603 sized SMD LEDs, soldered onto a tiny PCB. 20 LEDs are used per digit, which can display numbers 0-9 and letters A-F. The LEDs are laid out in a pattern similar to Hewlett-Packard designs from years past. This layout gives the numerals a more pleasant appearance compared to a more-classic 7-segment design. Several tricks are used to make the devices as compact as possible, such as putting vias in the LED pads. This is normally a poor design technique, but it helps save valuable space.

[sjm4306] has developed a breadboard model, and a more advanced version that has a pad on the rear to mount a PIC16F88 microcontroller directly. We look forward to seeing these modules developed further, and can imagine they’d prove useful in a variety of projects.

For reference, check out these Soviet-era 7-segment displays. Video after the break.

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A Work Light For Hacker Events

May 31, 2019 by Jenny List No comments

If you’ve ever attended a hacker camp, you’ll know the problem of a field of tents lit only by the glow of laser illumination through the haze and set to the distant thump of electronic dance music. You need to complete that project, but the sun’s gone down and you didn’t have space in your pack to bring a floodlight.

In Days of Yore you might have stuck a flickering candle in an empty Club-Mate bottle and carried on, but this is the 21st century. [Jana Marie] has the solution for you, and instead of a candle, her Club-Mate bottle is topped a stack of LED-adorned PCBs with a lithium-ion battery providing a high intensity downlight. It’s more than just a simple light though, it features variable brightness and colour temperature through touch controls on the top surface, as well as the ability to charge extra 18650 cells. At its heart is an STM32F334 microcontroller with a nifty use of its onboard timer to drive a boost converter, and power input is via USB-C.

We first saw an early take on this project providing illumination for a bit of after-dark Hacky Racer fettling at last year’s EMF 2018 hacker camp, since then it has seen some revisions. It’s all open-source so you can give it a go yourself if you like it.

A Stylish Solution For Bike Navigation

May 29, 2019 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

[André Biagioni] is developing an open hardware bicycle navigation device called Aurora that’s so gorgeous it just might be enough to get you pedaling your way to work. This slick frame-mounted device relays information to the user through a circular array of SK6812 RGB LEDs, allowing you to find out what you need to know with just a quick glance down. No screen to squint at or buttons to press.

The hardware has already gone through several revisions, which is exactly what we’d expect to see for an entry into the 2019 Hackaday Prize. The proof of concept that [André] zip-tied to the front of his bike might have worked, but it wasn’t exactly the epitome of industrial design. It was enough to let him see that the idea had merit, and from there he’s been working on miniaturizing the design.

So how does it work? The nRF52832-powered Aurora connects to your phone over Bluetooth, and relays turn-by-turn navigation information to you via the circular LED array. This prevents you from having to fumble with your phone, which [André] hopes will improve safety. When you’re not heading anywhere specific, Aurora can also function as a futuristic magnetic compass.

With what appears to be at least three revisions of the Aurora hardware already completed by the time [André] put the project up on Hackaday.io, we’re very interested in seeing where it goes from here. The theme for this year’s Hackaday Prize is moving past the one-off prototype stage and designing something that’s suitable for production, and so far we’d say the Aurora project is definitely rising to the challenge.

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Wireless LEDs Aren’t A First, But You Can Make Your Own

May 28, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

Wireless LEDs. That’s what [Scotty Allen] found in Japan, and if you find something you just have to replicate it.

[Scotty] found these wireless LEDs in a display stand for model makers and gunpla. Because you don’t want to run wires, drill holes, and deal with fiber optics when illuminating plastic models, model companies have come up with wireless LEDs. Just glue them on, and they’ll blink. It requires a base station, but these are wireless LEDs.

After buying a few of these LEDs and sourcing a base station, [Scotty] found the LEDs were three components carefully soldered together: an inductor, two caps, and the LED itself. The base station is simply two coils and are effectively a wireless phone charger. Oh, some experimentation revealed that if you put one of these wireless LEDs on a wireless phone charger it’ll light up.

The next step is of course replication, so [Scotty] headed out to Akihabara and grabbed some wire, resistors, and LEDs. The wire was wrapped into a coil, a LED soldered on, and everything worked. This is by no means the first DIY wireless LED, as with so many technologies this too hit fashion first and you could buy press-on nails with embedded wireless LEDs for years now. Check out the video below.

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ESP8266 Upgrade Gives IKEA LEDs UDP Superpowers

May 27, 2019 by Tom Nardi 39 Comments

It can be difficult to resist the impulse buy. You see something interesting, the price is right, and even though you know you should do your research first, you end up putting it in your cart anyway. That’s how [Tobias Girstmair] ended up being the not-so proud owner of a LEDBERG RGB LED strip from IKEA, and what eventually pushed him to replace wimpy original controller with an ESP8266.

So what was the problem with the original controller? If you can believe it, it was incapable of producing white light. When IKEA says an LED is multi-color, they apparently mean it’s only multi-color. A quick check of the reviews online seem to indicate that the white version is sold as a different SKU that apparently looks the same externally and has confused more than a few purchasers.

Rather than having to pick one or the other, [Tobias] decided he would replace the original controller with an ESP-03, hoping that would give him granular enough control over the LEDs to coax a suitably white light out of them. He didn’t want to completely start from scratch, so one of the first decisions he made was to reuse the existing PCB and MOSFETs. Some handy test points on the PCB allowed him to hook the digital pins of the ESP right to the red, blue, and green LED channels.

Then it was just a matter of coming up with the software. To keep things simple, [Tobias] decided to create a “dumb” controller that simply sets the LED color and intensity according to commands it receives over a simplified UDP protocol. Anything beyond that, such as randomized colors or special effects, is done with scripts that run on his computer and fire off the appropriate UDP commands. This also means he can manually control his newly upgraded LEDBERG strips from basically anything that can generate UDP packets, such as an application on his Android phone.

It might not be the most robust implementation we’ve ever seen, but all things considered, it looks as though this modification could be a pretty good way to get some cheap network controlled RGB lighting in your life.