LED Art Project Is Geometrically Beautiful

December 13, 2023 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

There is no shortage of companies on the Internet willing to sell you expensive glowing things to stick on your walls. Many hackers prefer to make their own however, and [Chris] is no exception. His LED wall art is neat, tidy, and stylish, all at once.

Wanting a geometric design, [Chris] decided to have his layout designed by a random number generator. He created his own tool that would generate a design using preset segment lengths arranged in a random fashion. Once he found a layout that worked for him, he designed a set of plastic adapters that would let him connect pre-cut lengths of aluminium channel together so he could assemble his design.

With the frame complete, he then laid the LED strips into the channels, after mapping out how he would connect the full circuit of addressable LED strips. He enlisted a Raspberry Pi Zero W as the brains of the operation, responsible for commanding the strips to light in the colors of his desire.

In a nice aesthetic touch, he sanded the whole frame and painted it a uniform grey color. This hid the joins between the 3D-printed parts and the aluminium channels, and gave it a more finished look. He also went to the trouble of graphing out the locations of the various LEDs in the frame, and used this data as the basis for animations that race between points on the frame. It’s somehow more compelling than the usual simple color fades and flashes of typical commercial products.

It’s a tidy build, and a level more artful than some of the off-the-shelf products out there. For his investment of time and money, [Chris] has netted an excellent piece of wall art in the process.

A Tiny Board For Driving LEDs In…Whatever

October 26, 2023 by Lewin Day 19 Comments

Whether you’re into chiptune or just playing Tetris on original hardware, you might like rocking a heavily-customized Game Boy. Lovely flashing LEDs can only improve the aesthetic, so if that’s what you’re after, you might consider the ARCCore board from [NatalieTheNerd].

The board is a compact and easy way to drive some addressable LEDs, with a form factor designed to take up a small amount of space when stuffed into a Game Boy or other game console. It rocks an RP2040 microcontroller set up to drive a strip of WS2812B LEDs. Three buttons are used to configure the color and brightness settings. The board is designed to run on 3.3 to 5 V, thanks to an onboard buck converter. It’s capable of delivering enough juice to run up to 10 RGB LEDs, though you could potentially use more if you ran them from external power.

You can use just about any microcontroller on the market today to run addressable LEDs if you so desire. If you want a compact drop-in solution that takes up less space, though, you might find the ARCCore useful. If you’ve got your own nifty kit for running addressable LEDs, don’t hesitate to share it with the broader hacker massive — hit the tipsline!

Minimalist LED Lamp Is Circular Beauty Incarnate

September 4, 2023 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Lamps used to be things built to provide light with specific purpose, whether as reading lamps, desk lamps, or bedside table lamps. Now we just build them for the vibes, as with this minimalist LED lamp from [andrei.erdei].

The build uses a 3D-printed frame printed in opaque grey, with a diffuser element printed in a more translucent white. This is key to allowing the LED to nicely glow through the lamp without ugly distracting hotspots spoiling the effect. The lamp mounts 36 WS2812B LEDs in strip form. These are controlled from an Arduino Nano running the FastLED library for lightweight and easy control of the addressable LEDs. Smooth rainbow animations are made easy by the use of the HSV color space, which is more suitable for this job than the RGB color space you may otherwise be more familiar with.

[andrei.erdei] does a great job of explaining the build, including the assembly, electronics, and code aspects. The latter could serve as a particularly good resource if you’re just starting out on your own builds in the blinky, glowable space. Video after the break.

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Why Are We Only Just Now Hearing About LED Beaded Curtains

August 31, 2023 by Lewin Day 20 Comments

Beaded curtains are a pretty banal piece of home decor, unlikely to excite most interior design enthusiasts. Throw on some addressable LEDs, though, and you’ve got something eye-catching at the very least, as [Becky] demonstrates.

Joining the LED strands at the bottom made running the wiring easy but made walking through the blinds hard.

The project started with an existing beaded curtain as a base. A series of addressable LED strands were then carefully sewn to the beads using knots tied in plain sewing thread. The strands were configured as a single strand as far as the data lines were concerned, to make animation easy. Power was supplied to both ends of the strand to ensure nice and even brightness across the strands.

The brains of the system is a PixelBlaze controller, which makes it easy to wirelessly control the behavior of the strings. It’s the perfect tool for quickly whipping up fancy animations and pretty effects without hand-assembling a bunch of code yourself.

There was only a few problems with the project. [Becky] found a pretty passable LED beaded curtain from China midway through the project, which reduced her enthusiasm to finish the build. There were also issues walking through the curtain due to the wiring scheme she chose, where the bottom of one strand was connected to its neighbor.

Regardless, it’s a fun blinky build that brings some color to an otherwise drab doorway. It’s hard to complain about that! Video after the break.

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Turn Your Furniture Into A Light Show With Hyelicht

November 26, 2022 by Tom Nardi 18 Comments

There’s something about the regimented square shapes of the IKEA Kallax shelf that convinced [Eike Hein] it could benefit from some RGB LED lighting, and while he could have simply used a commercial solution, he decided instead to develop Hyelicht: an incredibly well documented open source lighting system featuring multiple control interfaces and APIs. We’d say it was overkill, but truth be told, we dream of a world where everyone takes their personal projects to this level.

In the boilerplate configuration, [Eike] shows off controlling the LEDs using a graphical user interface running on a Waveshare 7″ touch screen mounted to the side of the shelf. That’s the most direct way of controlling the LEDs, as the touch screen is plugged into the Raspberry Pi 4B that’s actually running the software. But the same interface can also be remotely accessed by your smartphone or desktop.

You can also skip the GUI entirely and control the LEDs with a command line interface, or maybe poke Hyelicht’s HTTP REST interface instead. The system can even integrate with the Philips Hue ecosystem, if you prefer going that route.

The 5×5 Kallax shelf is the project’s official reference hardware, but of course it will work with anything else you might wish to cover with controllable LEDs. We’ve seen similar setups used to light storage bins in the past, but nothing that can even come close to the documentation and customization possibilities offered by Hyelicht. This is definitely a project to keep a close eye on if you’ve got the urge to add a little color to your world.

The word clock on a desk, with "tien", "over", "half" and "twaalf" lit

An Impeccably Documented Word Clock In Dutch

July 18, 2022 by Arya Voronova 8 Comments

[Maarten Pennings] shares a word clock project – but not the regular kind. For a start, this clock is a shining demonstration of hobbyist-available 3D printing technologies, with embedded light guides for the letters printed in transparent filament, thanks to a dual-extruder printer. For a word clock, it’s surprisingly small – in fact, it uses an 8×8 addressable LED matrix, with words shown in different colors. If you’re looking to build a novel word clock, you’re all set here – [Maarten] tells all about this project’s story and provides a treasure trove of insights into designing all of its aspects!

The 8×8 limitation was initially set because he wanted to use a low-cost MAX7219 8×8 LED matrix module as a base for the clock. Thankfully, in Dutch, time can be expressed using shorter words — still, it had to be limited to 5-minute intervals. Extra effort had to be spent designing the layout — [Maarten] mentions his friend writing a solver that found a way to fit some words onto the layout diagonally. At some point, he switched from LEDs to Neopixels, and dug deep into addressable LED technology. For instance, he demonstrates Neopixel power measurements and current consumption calculations. This shows that the calculations indeed match the clock’s real consumption when measured by an external meter.

In the best of hacker traditions, all the source files are on Github — if you fancy yourself a Dutch word clock, you can build [Maarten]’s design easily! He provides extensive instructions on building this clock in the README, including a flashing and configuration tutorial, complete wiring diagrams, and a soldering guide. A manufacturing-grade amount of build information that won’t leave you guessing. He’s also added a fair number of animations, put plenty of effort into clock precision verification, and even investigated some Neopixel protocol minutiae. All in all, our hacker went all in on the capabilities while embracing the constraints. This reminds us of the similarly well-documented haptic word clock we covered just a year ago – check that one out, too!

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Throwback: Designing Addressable LEDs From Scratch

July 13, 2022 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

These days, addressable LEDs are all the rage. A little chip paired with each LED receives signals and modulates the light output as needed. [John Peterson] was working on a project along these very lines, designing his Curilights back in 2008!

[John] wasn’t the first to come up with the idea; he designed the Curilights to replicate a string of programmable LEDs he’d seen called Triklits. His design involved each RGB LED being fitted with a Microchip PIC 16F688 microcontroller, which could receive serial data and control the LED channels with PWM. These LEDs could then be strung up to create an addressable chain. It’s fundamentally the same concept as the WS2812, just in a larger format and built by hand. His design also had the benefit of non-volatile memory onboard the PICs, so animations could be stored even after power off. [John] later went on to build a controller for his lights, complete with sensors. It could be triggered by a motion sensor or light sensor, and would run animations on the string without the use of a computer.

While [John]’s design didn’t go on to bigger things or commercial success, it did win first place at the Third Annual Lantronix Wireless Design Contest. It also goes to show that many people will come around to the same idea when it makes good sense!

If you’re interested in the wider world of addressable LEDs, check out our breakdown on some of the products out there. Meanwhile, if you’re brewing up your own flashing, glowing projects, be sure to notify the tipsline!