glowables

9 Articles

Supercon 2024: Rethinking Body Art With LEDs

April 2, 2025 by 3 Comments

Tattoos. Body paint. Henna. All these are popular kinds of body art with varying histories and cultural connotations, many going back centuries or even longer. They all have something in common, though—they all change how the body reflects light back to the viewer. What if, instead, body art could shine a light of its very own?

This is the precise topic which [Katherine Connell] came to discuss at the 2024 Hackaday Supercon. Her talk concerns rethinking body art with the use of light emitting diodes—and is both thoroughly modern and aesthetically compelling. Beyond that, it’s an engineering development story with liquid metal and cutting-edge batteries that you simply don’t want to miss!

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Home Depot Lamp Gets A Rainbow Upgrade

February 14, 2025 by 14 Comments

Home Depot has at times sold a neat spiral lamp that relies on LEDs to supply its soothing white glow. When [Craig Lindley] saw some modified versions on YouTube he decided he had to build one himself. The result is a charming rainbow lamp that really lights up a room (pardon the pun).

[Craig] first set about stripping the lamp of its white LED strips, replacing them with addressable WS2812B LEDs. No more would the lamp just output white light—any color in the RGB gamut was now on the table.

A powerful 10 amp 5 volt power supply was then installed to provide the necessary juice. A Wemos D1 Mini was pressed into service as the controller, which was also hooked up to an HC-SR04 infrared motion sensor. This provided the capacity to trigger the lamp when it detects someone moving nearby.

Alternatively, the lamp was given a time-activated mode as well. Either way, when activated, the lamp displays a range of colorful patterns on its elegant spirals, all with the aid of the popular FastLED library.

The final result is impressive—it looks almost stock, except it’s far more colorful and interesting to look at than the original. It’s also amusingly hard to display in our usual image formats because it’s so tall and narrow. In any case, we’ve seen some great lamp builds before, too. If you’re working on your own charming illuminations, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

Very Tiny Cube Has 384 RGB LEDs

October 1, 2024 by 2 Comments

When it comes to making things that glow, there are two ways to stand out from the crowd. You can make something very big, or something very small. [DIY GUY Chris] has done the latter, producing a tiny LED cube that he says is the world’s smallest.

As is so often the way, the build relies on tiny WS2812B-compatible LEDs in a 1 mm x 1 mm form factor. They’re mounted on a series of teeny interlocking PCBs that come together to build a cube that’s just 8 cubic centimeters in volume. Power is courtesy of a small lithium-ion cell that lives inside the cube. Data and power signals flow around the cube via solder connections along the edges of the faces of the cube.  Running the show is an ATmega328P, the same microcontroller you’d find in an Arduino Uno. It’s responsible for sending out commands to the LEDs to create various animations.

We can’t speak to [Chris’s] claim about being the world’s smallest, but it is small. We’ve seen other builds in a similar vein, like this barely-larger D20 with a full 2400 LEDs, though. Video after the break.

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Build Yourself A Beautiful Interactive Light Toy

September 5, 2024 by 7 Comments

Sometimes, we build things with LEDs as indicator lamps or to illuminate something important. Sometimes, we build things with LEDs purely to glow and be beautiful. This interactive light toy from [Jens] falls into the latter category.

The build uses a 16×16 addressable LED matrix.  [Jens] then ported some “Bouncy Bubbles” Processing code from Keith Peters to the Arduino Mega, and set it up to display on the matrix. An accelerometer was used to control the bouncing ball animations, while a second Arduino was then tapped to act as a musical synthesizer to add more vibes. The whole kit was then built into a 3D-printed housing with a nice hazy diffuser to give the LEDs a smoother, even look. [Jens] steps through how he got the diffuser just right, including a support structure that made all the difference to the aesthetic of the finished product. Getting diffusion right is key to making a nice LED project, and [Jens] got it very right here.

It’s a nice little art piece that looks kind of relaxing to play with in a dark room. We love a good glowable project here at Hackaday, so if you’ve built your own—don’t hesitate to let us know! Video after the break.

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Minimalist LED Lamp Is Circular Beauty Incarnate

September 4, 2023 by 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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Tutorial Teaches You To Use Neopixels With Micropython

February 12, 2022 by 4 Comments

Addressable LEDs are wonderful things, with products like Neopixels making it easy to create all kinds of vibrant, blinking glowables. However, for those without a lot of electronics experience, using these devices can seem a bit daunting. [Bhavesh Kakwani] is here to help, with his tutorial on getting started with Neopixels using the MicroPython environment. 

The tutorial flows on from [Bhavesh’s] Blink example for MicroPython, and is aimed at beginners who are learning for the first time. It explains the theory behind RGB color mixing that allows one to generate all manner of colors with WS2812B-based LED strings, and how to code for the Raspberry Pi Pico to make these LEDs do one’s bidding.

The guide even covers the use of the Wokwi simulation tool. This is a great way for beginners to test their projects before having to play with actual hardware. This is useful for beginners, because it’s a great way to catch mistakes – is there a software problem, or did they push the soldering iron through the microcontroller? It’s also a technique that pays dividends when working on more complicated projects.

Whether you’re entirely new to the embedded world, or just want to learn the intricacies of talking to addressable LEDs and make sense of color mixing theory, this tutorial will serve you well. Before you know it, you’ll be building glowing projects with the best of them!

 

DIY Nanoleaf LED Panels Offer Peace Of Mind

February 11, 2022 by 14 Comments

Nanoleaf light panels are a popular product for creating glowing geometric designs on walls. However, for those that like to avoid IoT devices that integrate with big cloud services, they’re not ideal, and involve compromising on one’s privacy, somewhat. [Viktor] decided to build something of his own instead to avoid this problem.

The design is that of an equilateral triangle, which allows the panels to tesselate well. Each panel consists of two 3D printed parts. The black PLA base holds the WS2812B LED strips, cabling, and ESP8266 controller, while a white PLA cover goes over the top, which acts as a diffuser to spread the light from the individual LEDs. Each triangle contains 24 LEDs, and six triangles together consume around 1.6 amps when in use.

The benefit of the system is that it’s not controlled from a company’s cloud system, which can be shutdown at any time. [Viktor’s] setup runs entirely independently, and can be controlled from a simple web page. Plus, there’s nothing stopping him from modifying the code to use the panels for any purpose; commercial products like Nanoleaf don’t offer anywhere near the flexibility of building your own.

We’ve seen others build their own smart lighting with similar techniques before, too. Video after the break.

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