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129 Articles

Lucid Dreaming

March 6, 2010 by 28 Comments

When we saw [merkz] use of an Arduino to produce lucid dreaming we were quite shocked. Unlike typical setups that just flash a light through sleep, his system monitors eye movement through electrodes and is able to send the data to a computer for graphing and analyzing.  The only problem being we couldn’t find a circuit diagram or code.

Not ones to be shot down so quickly, a Google revealed this thread on making ‘Dream Goggles’, which was really a Brain-Wave Machine based on the parallel port. Some modifications of an ECG collector’s electrodes using sound cards, and you could have your own lucid dreaming.

[Thanks Phil]

Cooling LEDs By Heating The Water Saves On Electricity

February 26, 2010 by 32 Comments

[Matthias] swapped out his twin-tube florescent aquarium lights for LEDs. By running tank water through the aluminum LED mounts he’s transferring excess heat into the water in the tank, in turn saving some of the electricity that would have been used to heat the tank. Couple this with roughly 35 Watts saved by moving away from fluorescent tubes and he’s got a great energy-saving hack. The LEDs used in the last aquarium light conversion were cooled by heat sinks and fans. We’d love to see this concept incorporated into that design.

Salty LEDs

January 29, 2010 by 34 Comments

[Davross] pulled off an LED lighting build for his coral aquarium. The module consists of a wooden body holding a 3×16 grid of LEDs. They are mounted to heat sinks which themselves have cooling fans to help keep those puppies from melting. The system is controlled by an Arduino which allows for almost limitless lighting options. The photo above shows the LEDs running at 50%. He’s also taken some photos of the tank in “moonlight” mode. It’s a long and detailed forum thread but you can skip to some nice photos of the coral under the lights or details about the build.

[Thanks Passmadd]

Adding A Netbook Keyboard Light

January 28, 2010 by 33 Comments

[Vikash] was having trouble using his netbook in the dark so he added a keyboard light. He’s got a Dell Vostro A90 which is the same hardware as the popular Dell Mini 9. We agree that the condensed keyboard layout makes it hard to type without looking; just try to find the quotation mark, brackets, and tilde keys! He added an LED to the bezel around the LCD screen in order to shed light on the situation. Now the LED can be turned on using CTRL. An ATtiny13 microcontroller monitors pins 1 and 11 of the keyboard, waiting for the CTRL keypress, then turns on the light when it receives it. This hardware solution means it doesn’t matter if you’re running a Hackintosh (like he is), Ubuntu (like we are), or that other OS.

Unreasonably Bright Bike Light Apparently Hunts Deer

October 22, 2009 by 79 Comments

ureasonably-bright-bike-light

[Jukka] wanted a bike light that wasn’t afraid to go into the woods during the dark winter. He put together a lamp that uses eight 3 Watt LEDs to pump out 1680 lumens (english translation). The high power LEDs were mounted on a large aluminum heat sink and use lenses to optimize the beam of light. The system uses a 2 amp driver board that he assembled himself. Power is provided by sixteen AA Nickel Metal Hydride batteries that are housed along with the driver circuit in a water bottle.

This more than doubles the output of the last bike light we thought was too bright. Where will this lumen-arms-race stop?

[Thanks Sami]

Halloween Prop: Portable Black Light

October 2, 2009 by 6 Comments

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[Joshua] wrote in to show us this great Halloween tip. He wanted to take his 4 foot long black light along with him on Halloween. You can buy portable versions, but he realized he had enough parts laying around to slap together a portable one himself. He pulled the inverter from a scanner light and wired it up to a couple of 9 volt batteries. Knowing he would probably need a fresh set during the night, he actually wired in some extras with a switch to control which was powering the unit. We know this isn’t the best solution, but you could probably toss this together in just a few minutes.

700 Lumen LED Bike Lamp

September 3, 2009 by 15 Comments

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We’ve seen bright bike lamps before. This one caught our eye because it needs a heat sink while in operation. [700lumenLED] built a super bright light for his bike that features an aluminum enclosure and heat sinks to protect the LEDs against overheating.  Some nice work was done incorporating the 12v battery into a bike bottle with the power switch and a dimming potentiometer attached to the bottle cap.