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1373 Articles

Make Your Own LEDs

May 7, 2009 by 19 Comments

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Ever wanted to make your own LED? You might be tempted to after reading how easy it is. No, this won’t really be a practical LED that you would use to light a project, but it is very cool anyway. [Michael] picked up a box of Moissanite, or Silicon Carbide, on eBay for roughly $1. Making the LED is as easy as putting your positive lead to the crystal and touching it with a sewing needle attached to a negative lead. He has tips on how to get the best results as well as a little bit of history of LEDs on the site.

[thanks Andreas]

An Amazingly Professional LED Bike Light

May 7, 2009 by 15 Comments

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[Tom] sent us a link to this very professionally done project. He built a bike light that is a 540 lumen Luxeon light with a custom case.  The LED, Lens, and driver were purchased first. Everything else was designed around it. The design is compact and good looking. You can download the CAD files on the site if you want to make your own. He is using an Atmel AVR ATTiny13 to control brightness.

Peggy 2 Super Pixels

May 6, 2009 by 15 Comments

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[Windell] from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories took one of their Peggy 2 kits and gave it a little upgrade. The Peggy 2 is a programmable 25×25 LED display. It’s Arduino compatible and can accommodate big 10mm LEDs. Most people assemble them using just one color, but [Windell] decided to create giant RGB pixels by placing discrete red, green, blue, and white LEDs next to each other in the board. This creates a 12.5×12.5 grid of full color pixels. It’s an interesting effect and you should definitely check out the video embedded below which shows how the transition can be smoothed using a diffuser. Continue reading “Peggy 2 Super Pixels” →

Modular POV Final Project

May 6, 2009 by 12 Comments

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[Jonathan] sent us his final project for ECE 476. His group built an LED POV display that can be updated wirelessly from a computer. They built it in a somewhat modular fashion, with the LED strip being a simple to replace module. This goes along with their plan to build a 3D version of the display. They have made it able to switch easily from it’s internal programming to direct computer control, allowing them to leave it alone in clock mode, or take control to play with it. The updates seem really quick, you can see them in effect in the video after the break. All source code and schematics are available on the site. We love these final projects, they usually have tons of data and great pictures. Keep them coming.

Continue reading “Modular POV Final Project” →

LED Buttons

May 4, 2009 by 26 Comments

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For their final project in ECE 4760 at Cornell, [Christina] and [Joe] made a small single octave keyboard using LEDs as the input. They used a total of 63 LEDs to make the keys. Each key consists of 9 LEDs, with the center one acting as a sensor. When you lay your finger on it, the light reflects off of your finger and is picked up by the center LED. An ATMega 664 runs custom code to play a sound. You can find out more details about the construction as well as download the source code on the site. You can also download an example movie of it in action ( 7MB .mp4)

Space Invader Button

April 14, 2009 by 36 Comments

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[Marcus] saw [Alex]’s 64 pixel project and decided it could be implemented in even less space. Pictured above is his Space Invader button with a bicolor LED matrix. The controller board is all SMD and piggybacked on the matrix. An ATmega164P drives the 24 pins via transistors. In addition to animation, the board can do LED sensing too. It’s a very clever project and [Marcus] has some notes about working with such tiny components. You can see a video of it below. Continue reading “Space Invader Button” →