BlokClok – Abstract Time Display

blokclok_abstract_time_display

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.

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Uzebox Video Player

[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

[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.

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Peggy 2 Super Pixels

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[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”

Space Invader Button

spaceinvaderbutton

[Marcus] saw [Alex]’s 64 pixel project and decided it could be implemented in even less space. Pictured above is his Space Invader button with a bicolor LED matrix. The controller board is all SMD and piggybacked on the matrix. An ATmega164P drives the 24 pins via transistors. In addition to animation, the board can do LED sensing too. It’s a very clever project and [Marcus] has some notes about working with such tiny components. You can see a video of it below. Continue reading “Space Invader Button”

Gameboy Color On An LED Matrix

[youtube=http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=-n-iORmV3Qk]

Here is a video of a GameBoy Color being played on an LED matrix. He has built it up to 140×140 LEDs so far and it seems to be going well. He needs to add the final 20 LEDs to get the 160×140 resolution of the GameBoy.  He notes in the comments that he had some problems with dead LEDs in the boards he got from eBay. Trying to remove the dead LED with a hot air rework station resulted in massive damage to the board. At one point he says that the power consumption is 1KW when showing all white. Wow, that’s a drain.

[Kevtris] gave us some more info in the comments with a link to the build pictures in his blog.

[thanks tReg]