Hackaday Links: February 14, 2010

February 14, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

$30,000?

Is it art or is it a puzzle? Well, it functions as a game but it’s certainly a work of art and priced accordingly. The Superplexus was featured in Make Mazine and Hammacher Schlemmer sells it for thirty grand (you can’t just click to add it to your cart though). Think of the work that went into developing this! [via The Awesomer]

Rollable Display Update

[SeBsZ] continues work on his rollable display matrix. He’s got twenty five controller boards now and has them working as a matrix. We originally covered this in January but now it’s much easier to see how this can be made portable by mounting it on fabric or canvas. Check out the demo video if your interested.

Security testing suite

BackTrack 4 final has been released. If you didn’t like it when it was rough around the edges, you should give it another try. This lean and mean Linux ditro is made for security testing and is approachable for noob and pro alike. [Thanks Steve]

Power on the go

[Csae] uses this portable power center to fire up some studio strobes outside. It consists of a case, an uninterruptible power supply, and a couple of extension cords all hacked together into one. At first you might think this is a bit ghetto but it’s portable and it does what is intended.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Giving this LED-heart adorned shirt as a gift is sure to make your Valentine head for the hills. This project’s a few year’s old, but gawdy T-shirts never go out of style, right?

Voice Controlled LED Sign

November 10, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 8 Comments

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiYYJ5WMG6I&feature=player_embedded%5D

120 LEDs and NerdKit, check. Python and appropriate Google Voice module, check. Blend on high for 2 minutes, bake for an hour at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Your soufflé is done, whoops, we mean your voice controlled LED sign is done. Leave a voicemail on Davis’ Google Voice account that starts with “message” and it will be displayed for all to read within a matter of minutes. We think: make it bigger and add a security code before you can leave a message, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for some over sized message fun.

[via Make]

SMD LED Matrix

October 2, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 17 Comments

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Everyone loves a good LED matrix hack, and we’ve seen our fair share, but never a 16 by 24 hand soldered SMD one. [bear24rw] and his team needed a project reflecting the interests of one of his classes, being an EE major, an LED matrix was just the ticket. Based on this instructable, he was able to cobble together a driver board; the code however was unacceptable, and he came up with a double buffer array solution. You can grab the eagle file and source code here, while you’re at it check out a quick video after the break.

Continue reading “SMD LED Matrix” →

BlokClok – Abstract Time Display

September 21, 2009 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

Clocks made from blinking LEDs always make for fun projects. [Earthshine] built a clock that displays time abstractly using an 8×8 RGB LED matrix. The video embedded after the break illustrates how to read the time but here’s the gist of it: One LED is illuminated in the outside box of LEDs and moved in a clockwise motion to approximate seconds. Inside of this, there are four quadrants; upper left indicates hour-tens digit, upper right hour-ones, lower left minute-tens, and lower right minute-ones. This certainly makes for an interesting conversation piece!

There is no schematic and no code available but it’s really the concept that we’re interested in. If you must know, [Earthshine] bases this build around an Arduino. A DS1307 real time clock keeps the time, while four 74HC595 shift registers are utilized to control the three LED colors and the multiplexing.

Continue reading “BlokClok – Abstract Time Display” →

Uzebox Video Player

September 10, 2009 by Jake W 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWWsSn_QKLM]
Everyone’s favorite open source game console, the Uzebox (also cloned as the Fuzebox), just got a new feature hacked into it – a video player. At reduced quality (8-bit color), the Uzebox was able to play ‘The Matrix’ off an SD card @ 30fps plus the audio @15kHz. That’s a pretty impressive feat when one considers it is running on 4096 bytes of RAM. The video file had to first be converted into a series of pictures through a Photoshop macro in order to be playable. A Uzebox can be built with little more than a few resistors in addition to an overclocked ATmega644P, and AD725 (which has been skirted in certain incarnations).

LED Bottle Wall

June 13, 2009 by Eliot 10 Comments

[vimeo 5116519]

Here are two new projects from [Alex Beim] at Tangible Interactions. The video above is the bottle wall with a controllable LED behind each bottle. Embedded below is the 7×5 pixel Rainbow Box. He’s planning on writing a Quartz Composer patch to actively drive the display.

Continue reading “LED Bottle Wall” →

Peggy 2 Super Pixels

May 6, 2009 by Eliot 15 Comments

rgb

[Windell] from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories took one of their Peggy 2 kits and gave it a little upgrade. The Peggy 2 is a programmable 25×25 LED display. It’s Arduino compatible and can accommodate big 10mm LEDs. Most people assemble them using just one color, but [Windell] decided to create giant RGB pixels by placing discrete red, green, blue, and white LEDs next to each other in the board. This creates a 12.5×12.5 grid of full color pixels. It’s an interesting effect and you should definitely check out the video embedded below which shows how the transition can be smoothed using a diffuser. Continue reading “Peggy 2 Super Pixels” →