led

1300 Articles

LED Lightbar Controller

June 12, 2008 by 3 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ihIaNN9UBY&hl=en]
[Adam Grieg] recently posted this video of his LED lightbar controller at work making a strip of LEDs flash to the beat of his music. The controller does it by picking up the music via an electret microphone, then amplifying it with an LM386 Amp. The ATtiny13 microcontroller keeps track of the noise level and makes the LED array flash whenever it senses a peak.

In addition to the parts listed, [Grieg] used a small SparkFun box as the enclosure for the controller. If you’re considering trying your hand at this project, check out [Grieg]’s schematics and code. It’s relatively cheap to make, so it wouldn’t be that hard to rig up several of these set to flash at different frequencies.

[via SparkFun]

Roomba Pac-Man

June 3, 2008 by 15 Comments


[Ron Tajima] fashioned a Pac-Man casemod for his Roomba using 448 LEDs and a SH2 MPU control unit. It features the correct arcade sounds and even the death animation. The bot has Bluetooth access thanks to his previous Wiimote hack. He hopes to use this platform to create a real world version of the game.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wsP_nmk_iw&hl=en]

For more Roomba hacking, check out the Hacking Roomba book and our previous Roomba related posts.

[via Geekdad]

LED Ambient Light Strips

May 30, 2008 by 6 Comments


[Shadow] sent in his ambient LED strip project. He picked up a ton of RGB (Red/Green/Blue) LEDs off of eBay and built several LED strips. To get up and running, he used an LED-wiz controller. With the off the shelf controller, this is a pretty easy project, and the ambient lighting effect looks great. Check out the video after the break or on the project page.

In 2006, we posted about [rafkep]’s similar ambient lighting project.

Continue reading “LED Ambient Light Strips” →

Embedded LED Pong Table

May 28, 2008 by 7 Comments


There are few things that are enduring and axiomatic in life, but one of the things on our short list is love of Pong. Designer [Moritz Waldemeyer] apparently shares our obsession: you may remember the LED-lined stage uniforms he designed for OK Go, but this concept for a Pong table is certainly older and arguably several times more awesome.

Continue reading “Embedded LED Pong Table” →

Metalab’s LED Matrix Display

May 25, 2008 by 14 Comments


Our friends at Vienna’s Metalab have been working on this project quite a while. Soldering their hearts out to create an FPGA controlled monochrome LED dot matrix display. It’s 48×72 array totaling 3,456 LEDs, soldered by hand. It creates some serious geek bling thanks to an mplayer plugin developed just for the project and it runs up to 72fps. Build details and source code are on the project page. Be sure to check out the awesome video demo below.

Continue reading “Metalab’s LED Matrix Display” →

Maker Faire 2008: ShiftBright RGB LED Module

May 8, 2008 by 11 Comments


We made a point to stop by [garrett]’s booth at Maker Faire to to see what he had been working on. You may remember him from his random caps locker shenanigans. He’s just recently released the ShiftBright RGB LED module which makes it easy to implement a string of individually addressable LEDs. The module is based on the Allegro A6281 3-Channel Constant Current LED Driver. The driver chip is capable of displaying a billion colors using an RGB LED. The 3x3mm package is mounted to the backside of the board while a bright common-anode RGB is mounted to the front. The modules are designed to be daisy chained together and are individually addressed using a serial interface. You can find Arduino example code on the site and more info on how the item was developed. Read on for close up images.

Continue reading “Maker Faire 2008: ShiftBright RGB LED Module” →