[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7Pft-GPQWU]
After getting some fun new toys for Christmas, [IceColdFreezie] set up this kill counter for Team Fortress 2. At first glance, we weren’t that impressed. It’s an Arduino and a few LEDs. Then we saw that it was counting the kills in binary. We’re not sure if it gets much geekier than that. You can download the source code and try it out yourself. Just don’t make more than 31 kills.
[via littlebirdceo]
[Joseph] wrote in to tell us about his Ikea Dioder hack. The Dioder is a lighting system with a silly name from Ikea. It is basically 4 RGB LED bars that are connected to a controller that will cycle their colors in different manners. They aren’t individually addressable, and at $50 aren’t really that great of a deal for people who could build their own. [Joseph] thought that maybe, if the features could be extended, it could be a decent lighting system. He bought it and began searching. Disappointed by the lack of hacks available, he cracked it open and began brainstorming. Ultimately, he decided to interface it with his computer. He can now control it with software, so making an ambilight clone shouldn’t be too difficult.
He does mention that he thought of making 4 independent drivers so that each light bar could be a different color. We agree that this would be the next logical step, possibly even rewiring for individual access to each LED.
If you didn’t get the geeky watch you wanted for Christmas you should consider building yourself a MakerBotWatch. The watch is an Arduino, using an ATmega328 microcontroller running the bootloader. The watch has two concentric circles of LEDs for minutes and hours. A vertical row of four LEDs adds in the additional resolution needed to get 60 minutes on the watch face.
The schematic and board layout are available from an SVN repository so you can make your own board. The device will go into production as a kit but currently the laser-cut bezel will not be part of it.
[via Adafruit]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAt6A98lXQw]
[mrpackethead], created this monster of a tree. As shown in the video, it’s capable of showing animations, patterns, and potentially video. The 6m tall creation is studded with 2000 waterproof RGB LED modules. Software for the tree was written in Apple’s own Quartz Composer and integrated into Madrix, a piece of software designed with the purpose of controlling LEDs. The 600W system is 100% Arduino-free and costs less than the equivalent of 0.04USD per hour to run in New Zealand.
[Geoist] opted for the Arduino way to rig up his own smaller RGB Christmas tree. Finding a slightly kitschy fiber-optic model in his local department store, [Geoist] was eager to harness its colour-changing powers. Upon opening it up, it was discovered that it was controlled by nothing more than a light bulb and a spinning disk of coloured light filters. [Geoist] gutted the setup in favour of a breadboard with 3 RGB lights hooked up to an Arduino. The sketch for it is available on his site.
[Humberto] is at it again with a NerdKits video detailing the use of an SPI bus to communicate between microcontrollers. He started with a previous LED marquee project which was limited to a 5×24 LED Matrix and developed a modular solution to increase the size limitation.
The writeup and video embedded after the break do a great job of detailing the important differences between a stand-alone and a modular system. The good news is that the ATmega168 chips being used have a built-in interrupt based SPI protocol. Once wired correctly, a master control chip addresses each module separately, adding data to their buffer until a full frame has been transferred, then moves onto the next module.
Some of the caveats to this system such as digital transmission over long distances are discussed. We do wonder about power limitations if all LED’s in the marquee are illuminated at once. But that concern aside, if you’re thinking of playing around with an LED display don’t forget that there’s usually a huge price break for orders of 500 or 1000 LEDs!
It turns out that more than just pictures of women and flashing animations can be found on the X10 website. [Jonathan] based his BobLight project around the MS14A X10 module.
The idea for the devices started off as a Christmas gift for his parents in-law. A boblight turns on when motion is detected. It then communicates (through radio) with the other boblights to turn them all on. If motion is not detected by any of the boblights for a length of time, they all turn off. Rather than having the user shut all of them off every morning, a light sensor is used to automate the task.
Each boblight is a common LED utility light combined with the board of an MS14A and added a 310MHz RF receiver. He even hacked the board by replacing the onboard PIC with a higher spec model. We think [Jonathan] did a great job at implementing an innovative concept.
Here’s an advent wreath made from six parts and a paper clip. Powered by a CR2032 3v button cell, the circuit has been free-formed using a paper clip as the conductor. We love the “dead bug” style of construction used with the ATtiny13 microcontroller because it adds an extra level of intrigue for the uninitiated. This project build on the flickering circuit we saw last year and uses the LEDs as light sensors, only turning on when a certain darkness level has been reached.
We used a tiny13 with our Menorah project last year and still have some lying around that we can use for this. We’re sure you’ve got at least a couple of low-pin-count micros on hand. If you don’t, you should!
