Good Lighting On A Budget With Cordless Tool Batteries

December 12, 2024 by Dan Maloney 11 Comments

It’s perhaps not fair, but even if you have the best idea for a compelling video, few things will make people switch off than poor lighting. Good light and plenty of it is the order of the day when it comes to video production, and luckily there are many affordable options out there. Affordable, that is, right up to the point where you need batteries for remote shoots, in which case you’d better be ready to open the purse strings.

When [Dane Kouttron] ran into the battery problem with his video lighting setup, he fought back with these cheap and clever cordless tool battery pack adapters. His lights were designed to use Sony NP-F mount batteries, which are pretty common in the photography trade but unforgivably expensive, at least for Sony-branded packs. Having access to 20 volt DeWalt battery packs, he combined an off-the-shelf battery adapter with a 3D printed mount that slips right onto the light. Luckily, the lights have a built-in DC-DC converter that accepts up to 40 volts, so connecting the battery through a protection diode was a pretty simple exercise. The battery pack just slots right in and keeps the lights running for portable shoots.

Of course, if you don’t already have DeWalt batteries on hand, it might just be cheaper to buy the Sony batteries and be done with it. Then again, there are battery adapters for pretty much every cordless tool brand out there, so you should be able to adapt the design. We’ve also seen cross-brand battery adapters which might prove useful, too.

BikeBeamer Adds POV Display To Bicycle Wheels

June 11, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 16 Comments

Unless you’re living in a bicycle paradise like the Netherlands, most people will choose to add some sort of illumination to their bicycle to help drivers take note that there’s something other than a car using the road. Generally, simple flashing LEDs for both the front and the rear is a pretty good start, but it doesn’t hurt to add a few more lights to the bicycle or increase their brightness. On the other hand, if you want to add some style to your bicycle lighting system then this persistence of vision (POV) display called the BikeBeamer from [locxter] might be just the thing.

The display uses four LED strips, each housed in their own 3D printed case which are installed at 90-degree angles from one another in between the spokes of a standard bicycle wheel. An ESP32 sits at the base of one of the strips and is responsible for storing the image and directing the four displays. This is a little more complex than a standard POV display as it’s also capable of keeping up with the changing rotational speeds of the bicycle wheels when in use. The design also incorporates batteries so that no wires need to route from the bike frame to the spinning wheels.

This is an ongoing project for [locxter] as well, meaning that there are some planned upgrades even to this model that should be in the pipe for the future. Improving the efficiency of the code will hopefully allow for more complex images and even animations to be displayed in the future, and there are also some plans to improve the PCB as well with all surface-mount components. There are a few other ways to upgrade your bike’s lighting as well, and we could recommend this heads-up headlight display to get started.

DIY Tube Lights Look Amazing For Just $50 A Piece

December 31, 2023 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

It’s the future. We should have weird glowy lights everywhere, all over our homes, cars, and businesses. In the automotive world, luxury automakers are doing their part with LED ambient lighting systems, but the rest of us have to step up. [Super Valid Designs] has developed an excellent modular DMX lighting rig that’s fit for this purpose; the rest of us just have to get to work and build our own! (Video, embedded below.)

The design relies on hot-swapping powered bases that let a variety of different lights to be swapped in as needed. They use a custom four-pin socket designed by [Super Valid Designs] using PVC and ABS plumbing and conduit parts and tent pole springs from Home Depot. There’s a 3D-printable version, too, which is useful for those around the world that can’t get access to American standard gear easily. Anyone from the Nerf scene will understand this frustration well.

The real cool part of the modular rig, though, are the tube fixtures. There’s a ball design too, but they don’t look quite as future-cool as the tubes. They use fluorescent tube protectors as a cheap source of clear tubes, and use plumbing and conduit parts to make easy-insert connectors for pairing with the modular bases. Light is courtesy of old-school non-addressable RGB LED strips, attached to flat aluminium trim with their own adhesive combined with a wrap of clear packing tape as well. The LED strip is attached to one side of the tube, with parchment paper layered inside the tubes to act as a diffuser.

Building in quantities of 8 or more, [Super Valid Designs] reckons that the tubes can be built for $50 each or less. Of course, that adds up to a few hundred dollars in total, but the results speak for themselves.

If you’re thinking of tackling this project, but DMX is beyond your current skillset, fear not. We’ve got just the primer to get you started! Video after the break.

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Wireless Data Connections Through Light

August 25, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 38 Comments

When wired networking or data connections can’t be made, for reasons of distance or practicality, various wireless protocols are available to us. Wi-Fi is among the most common, at least as far as networking personal computers is concerned, but other methods such as LoRa or Zigbee are available when data rates are low and distances great. All of these methods share one thing in common, though: their use of radio waves to send data. Using other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum is not out of the question, though, and [mircemk] demonstrates using light as the medium instead of radio.

Although this isn’t a new technology (“Li-Fi” was first introduced in 2011) it’s not one that we see often. It does have a few benefits though, including high rates of data transmission. In this system, [mircemk] is using an LED to send the information and a solar cell as the receiver. The LED is connected to a simple analog modulator circuit, which takes an audio signal as its input and sends the data to the light. The solar cell sends its data, with the help of a capacitor, straight to the aux input on a radio which is used to convert the signal back to audio.

Some of the other perks of a system like this are seen here as well. The audio is clear even as the light source and solar cell are separated at a fairly significant distance, perhaps ten meters or so. This might not seem like a lot compared to Wi-Fi, but another perk shown is that this method can be used within existing lighting systems since the modulation is not detectable by the human eye. Outside of a home or office setting, systems like these can also be used to send data much greater distances as well, as long as the LED is replaced with a laser.

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Light Meets Movement With A Minimum Of Parts

June 15, 2023 by Tom Nardi 20 Comments

We often say that hardware hacking has never been easier, thanks in large part to low-cost modular components, powerful microcontrollers, and highly capable open source tools. But we can sometimes forget that what’s “easy” for the tinkerer that reads datasheets for fun isn’t always so straightforward for everyone else. Which is why it’s so refreshing to see projects like this LED chandelier from [MakerMan].

Despite the impressive final result, there’s no microcontrollers or complex electronics at work here. It’s been pieced together, skillfully we might add, from hardware that wouldn’t be out of place in a well-stocked parts bin. No 3D printed parts or fancy laser cutter involved, and even the bits that are welded together could certainly be fastened some other way if necessary. This particular build is not a triumph of technology, but ingenuity.

The video below is broken up roughly into two sections, the first shows how the motorized crank and pulley system was designed and tested; complete with various bits of scrip standing in for the final LED light tubes. Once the details for how it would move were nailed down, [MakerMan] switches over to producing the lights themselves, which are nothing more than some frosted plastic tubes with LED strips run down the center. Add in a sufficiently powerful 12 VDC supply, and you’re pretty much done.

As it so happens, this isn’t the first motorized lighting fixture that [MakerMan] has put together.

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Directing Ambient Light For Some Extra Glow

February 11, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 17 Comments

[Yuichiro Morimoto] wanted to create a decorative lamp, one that wasn’t burdened with batteries or wires, but used just the ambient light in the room to create a directed glow effect. Using a coloured circular acrylic sheet, with a special coating (not specified) ambient light impinging on the surface is diffused toward the edge. This centre sheet is embedded in an opalescent sheet, which scatters the light from the center sheet, giving a pleasant glow, kind of akin to a solar corona. An additional diffuser cover sheet on the front covers over the edge to hide it, and further enhance the glow effect.

Details of the ‘special coating’ are scarce, with the coloured sheet described as a condenser plate. This clearly isn’t the same as diffuser plastic, as that cannot be seen through as clearly as some of the photographs show. So we’re a little stumped on this one! Please answer in the comments if you can, ahem, shed some light on this one!

When talking about ambient light, many people will think more along the lines of active lighting, for example, adaptive ambient light around a TV like this hack.

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Taking (Good) Pictures Of PCBs

December 1, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 18 Comments

Snapping pictures is not technically difficult with modern technology, but taking good photographs is another matter. There are a number of things that a photographer needs to account for in order to get the best possible results, and if the subject matter isn’t particularly photogenic to start with it makes the task just a little more difficult. As anyone who’s posted something for sale online can attest, taking pictures of everyday objects can present its own challenges even to seasoned photographers. [Martijn Braam] has a few tricks up his sleeve for pictures like this in his efforts to photograph various circuit boards.

[Martijn] has been updating the images on Hackerboards, an online image reference for single-board computers and other PCBs, and he demands quality in his uploads. To get good pictures of the PCBs, he starts with ample lighting in the form of two wirelessly-controlled flashes in softboxes. He’s also using a high quality macro lens with low distortion, but the real work goes into making sure the image is sharp and the PCBs have well-defined edges. He’s using a Python script to take two pictures with his camera, and some automation in ImageMagic to composite the two images together.

While we’re not all taking pictures of PCBs, it’s a great way of demonstrating the ways that a workflow can be automated in surprising ways, not to mention the proper ways of lighting a photography subject. There are some other excellent ways of lighting subjects that we’ve seen, too, including using broken LCD monitors, or you can take some of these principles to your workspace with this arch lighting system.