Photographing LEDs

March 25, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

ledpics_1

Since we rely on you, our loyal readers, to supply the tasty projects that we thrive upon, we felt this writeup about how to photograph LEDs could be very useful. Photographing them can be quite difficult at times, they throw off the standard settings on your camera pretty easily. EMSL takes us through all the settings for best results. While you’re brushing up on your photography skills, you might want to consider making a flash ring, or some kind of macro lens. Now go take some awesome pictures and submit your projects.

SNES Toaster

March 22, 2009 by Eliot 17 Comments

nintoaster

From the same person who brought you the NES toaster comes the Super Nintoaster. It looks like the most difficult part of the construction was extending the cartridge connector. The slider button works as the power button. The toast control now changes the brightness of the glowing red LEDs. Video introduction embedded below.

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Daft Punk Costumes

March 21, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHrWllxRLgQ]

[derektroywest] has posted a detailed step by step breakdown of making a Daft Punk costume. They’ve done a great job, the overall look is very convincing. They include links to where to get each part as well as information on how they pulled it off. The helmets were inspired by the timelapse Daft Punk helmet build. As you can see in the video, they don’t have the entire visor made into a display, but the effect is quite nice, especially because it is multi color.

64pixels Are Enough

March 21, 2009 by Eliot 7 Comments

64pixel

[Alex] put together this lovely minimal LED project. The square pixel matrix is soldered directly to the microcontroller in the same style as EMSL’s Micro-Readerboard. During the prototyping phase he used resistors to limit the current from the programming board. The final product doesn’t use resistors and manages the current draw by only turning on a single pixel line at a time. The illustrated assembly guide is very thorough and should help your create an equally compact device. Check out a video of it in motion below.

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STK500 As An Arduino

March 8, 2009 by Eliot 5 Comments

stkarduino

The AVR STK500 has been Atmel’s standard AVR development platform for many years. Recently though, hobbyists have embraced the Arduino. [Alessandro] has decided to bring the two together so that you can use the Arduino environment with the STK500. Unlike the Arduino, it comes with 8 LEDs, 8 switches, a variable power supply, and variable analog reference. It’s a great way to get hardware you might already have back into service.

Temperature Sensing Munny

February 18, 2009 by Eliot 7 Comments

munny

Here’s another nerdy present that was built for Valentine’s Day. [João Silva] created a temperature sensing Munny. A Munny is a vinyl toy made to be customized. Other than these Munny speakers, we haven’t seen them in many electronics projects. The LM35CZ temperature sensor has an analog output that connects to the ADC on the ATtiny15L. The microcontroller changes the RGB LED’s color based on the temperature: blue for cold, green for comfortable, and red for hot. It only flashes every three minutes to conserve the power in the coin cells. His one-off circuit board also includes an ISP header for programming. The Munny’s head looks like it does a great job diffusing the light.

Molten Metal LED Display

February 16, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 19 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMuDudCiPR8]

firstly, we don’t know why they are doing this, and we don’t care. You are watching an LED panel, controlled by molten metal. The panel has the leads sticking down below the bottom of the board, so the metal can make connections as it flows past. They are using Wood’s metal, not mercury so it has to be heated to about 159 degrees Fahrenheit to be fluid. This has been representing problems as the metal tends to stick to whatever container he is holding it in. That actually seems to be what most of the writeup and discussion are about, rather than, what it will be used for.

[Thanks Andre]