[the4est] put together this quick how to for making a laser based light bulb night light. First, you need to break out the black glass base of the bulb and remove the filament. Scrub the inside of the bulb and pour in the paraffin. Once it sets, you can break the glass, leaving a solid wax bulb. Hollow out the inside, insert a laser pointer, and you’ll have fine glowing night light.
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Syringe Logic Probe, Revision 2
[Travis Goodspeed] has updated his syringe based logic probe that we covered earlier. Instead of soldering to the outside, he’s using silver wire shoved into the core of the needle. A nice side benefit is the safety cap now fits. Inside the syringe are two LEDs that indicate current direction. The sharp needle makes it a lot easier to hit small traces.
LED Lightbar Controller
[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
[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
[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.
Embedded LED Pong Table
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.
Metalab’s LED Matrix Display
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.
