Springs And Things Wrap Into A Polyhedron Of Interactive LED Art

August 2, 2020 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Any resemblance between The Wobble Sphere and a certain virus making the rounds these days is purely coincidental. Although as yet another project undertaken during the COVID-19 lockdowns, we can see where the inspiration came from.

Wobble Sphere is another work of interactive art from the apparently spring-driven imagination of [Robin Baumgarten], whose Quantum Garden piece graced our pages last year. The earlier, flatter version used a collection of spring door stops — the kind that sound awesome when plucked by a passing foot — each of which is surrounded by a Neopixel ring. The springs act as touch sensors that change the patterns and colors on the LED rings in endlessly fascinating ways.

For Wobble Sphere, [Robin] took the same spring and LED units, broke them into a collection of hexagonal and pentagonal PCBs, and wrapped the whole thing up into a 72-sided polyhedron. There’s some impressive mechanical and electrical engineering involved in the transition from 2D to 3D space, not least of which is solving the problem of how to connect everything while providing pluck-friendly structural support. The former was accomplished with a ton of ribbon cables, while the latter was taken care of with a combination of a 3D-printed skeleton and solder connections between adjacent PCBs. The result is a display that invites touch and rewards it with beautiful patterns of light chasing around the sphere. See it in action in the video after the break.

Lest anyone think springs are the only tool in [Robin]’s box, we mustn’t forget that he once set a knife-wielding Arduino-powered game on an unsuspecting public. Check it out; it’s way more fun than it sounds.

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A Face Mask That’s Functional And Hacker-Certified

July 27, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett 34 Comments

[splat238] needed a mask for going out in public, but wanted something that fit his personal style a bit better than the cloth masks everyone else was wearing. So, he upcycled his old airsoft mesh mask using an impressive 104 NeoPixels to create his NeoPixel LED Face Mask.

The NeoPixels are based on the popular WS2812b LEDs. These are individually addressable RGB LEDs with a pretty impressive glow. [splat238] purchased a 144 NeoPixel strip to avoid having to solder each of those 104 NeoPixels one-by-one. He cut the 144-LED strip into smaller segments to help fit the LEDs around the mask. He then soldered the power and data lines together so that he could still control the LEDs as if they were one strip and not the several segments he cut them into. He needed a pretty bulky battery pack to power the whole thing. You can imagine how much power 104 RGB LEDs would need to run. We recommend adding a battery protection circuit next time as these LEDs probably draw a hefty amount of current.

He designed his own controller board featuring an ESP8266 microcontroller. Given its sizable internal memory, the ESP8266 makes it easy to store a variety of LED patterns without worrying about running out of programming space. He’s also hoping to add some WiFi features in later revisions of his mask, so the ESP8266 is a no-brainer. Additionally, his controller board features three pushbuttons that allow him to toggle through different LED patterns on the fly.

Cool project [splat238]! Looking forward to the WiFi version.

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LED Art Hack Chat

June 29, 2020 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

Join us on Wednesday, July 1 at noon Pacific for the LED Art Hack Chat with Aaron Oppenheimer!

From the first time humans crawled into a cave with a bit of charcoal to sketch scenes from the world around them, artists have been searching for new media and new ways to express themselves. Natural products ruled for thousands of years, with pigments stolen or crafted from nature as well as wood, ivory, bone, and stone for carving. Time and experience guided our ancestors to new and better formulations and different materials, to the point that what qualifies as art and what we’d normally think of as technology have, in many cases, blended into one, with the artist often engineering projects of mammoth proportions and breathtaking beauty.

Aaron Oppenheimer co-founded color+light, a company that specializes in large-scale custom art installations for companies like Google, Nike, and Nissan. One of their projects, the “Oddwood Tree”, is displayed alongside other gigantic art pieces at Area15 on the Las Vegas strip. His most recent project, fluora, is a digital houseplant, with addressable LEDs in the leaves that can be controlled by a smartphone app or respond to stimuli in the environment.

Aaron will join us on the Hack Chat to discuss the LED as artistic medium. Join us as we learn what it takes to make enormous art that’s strong enough to interact with yet responsive enough to be engaging.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, July 1 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

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Flexible PCB Earrings Put The Art In Art Deco

May 24, 2020 by Kerry Scharfglass 5 Comments

Earrings have been a hackers’ target for electronic attachment for quite a while, but combining the needed components into a package small enough to wear in that finicky location is quite a challenge. If [Sawaiz Syed]’s Art Deco Earrings are anything to go by, ear computers have a bright future ahead of them!

This is a project unusually well described by its name. It is in fact an earring, with art deco styling. But that sells it way too short. This sliver of a flex circuit board is double sided to host an ATtiny, accelerometer, LDO, and eight 2020 formfactor controller-integrated LEDs. Of course it’s motion sensitive, reacting to the wearer’s movement via LED pattern. [Sawaiz] makes reference to wearing it while dancing, and we can’t help but imagine an entire ballroom all aglow with tiny points of LED light.

The Art Deco Earrings are also set apart by the thoroughness of their documentation (have we mentioned how much we love detailed documentation?). [Sawaiz] not only drops the source in your lap, but the README in the Github repo linked at the top walks the reader through each component of the design in detail. Plus the PCBA render is so complete it includes a model of the wire loop to fit through the wearer’s ear; how cool is that? The single piece that’s still in progress is the battery. The earring itself hosts an LDO, so all that is required is stashing a battery somewhere discrete, perhaps in the user’s hair? We’re looking forward to seeing what [Sawaiz] works out.

For the full effect, check out the gif of an assembled unit in action after the break.

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Come On Baby Light My Fire Button

May 22, 2020 by Sven Gregori No comments

While the Nintendo GameCube stood deep in the shadows of the PS2 in its day, its controller remains a popular target for all sorts of modifications today — many of them involving LEDs, thanks to a translucent bottom and button option. As an avid player of the Super Smash Bros. series, [goomysmash] is of course an owner of the very same controller, which motivated him to write GoomWave, a “versatile and hackable LED library”. In an impressively detailed Instructable, he shows how to modify your own controller in two different ways to make use of the library for yourself.

Initially inspired by the Shinewave mod that lights up RGB LEDs in colors associated to pre-defined moves in Smash Bros, [goomysmash] aimed to improve on it and add more versatility from the very beginning. Its latest iteration comes in a simplified ABXY-buttons-only variety using an ATtiny85, and a full-blown all-button variety using an Arduino Nano. Both of them are powered straight from the controller board, and have different modes where they either react to controller interactions, or are just custom lights. A brief showcasing of all the different modes can be seen in the video after the break, and there a few more details also in an older version’s video, also embedded below.

Mesmerizing LED-blinking aside, we just have to admire the diligence and cleanliness [goomysmash] put into the wiring and fitting everything inside the controller. But in case light mods aren’t your thing or you’re looking for other GameCube controller modifications, how about adding Bluetooth?

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NeoPixel Matrix Simulation Lets You Virtually Groove To The Lights

April 4, 2020 by Al Williams 5 Comments

You are stuck at home quarantined and you want to do some Arduino projects. The problem is you don’t have all the cool devices you want to use. Sure, you can order them, but the stores are slow shipping things that aren’t essential these days. If you want to get a headstart while you are waiting for the postman, check out Wokwi’s Playground. For example, you can write code to drive a virtual NeoPixel 16×16 matrix. There’s even example code to get you started.

There are quite a few other choices in the playground including Charlieplexed LEDs, a keypad, and an LCD. There are also challenges. For example, in the traffic light challenge, you are given code that uses a task scheduler library to implement a traffic light. You have to add a turn signal to the code.

In addition to LEDs in various configurations, the site has some serial bus components, an LCD, a keypad, and a NeoPixel strip. There are also a few tools including an EasyEDA to KiCad converter and a way to share sourcecode similar to Pastebin.

Of course, simulations only get you so far, but the site is a fun way to play with some different I/O devices. It would be very nice if you could compose for the different components together, but you could work your code in sections, if necessary. You can do similar things with TinkerCad circuits. If you want to install software, there’s a simulator for you, too.

Keep The Family At Bay While Working From Home With This WiFi Do Not Disturb Dongle

March 20, 2020 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

Those who have been suddenly introduced to the wonderful world of working from home over the last couple of weeks may have experienced a bit of culture shock. Even with today’s open floorplan workspaces and less-formal expectations, work isn’t home. That’s especially true with young children in the house, who’ll probably respond to seeing mommy or daddy working from home much differently than [Bob] from accounting would at the office.

To smooth out the rough spots of transitioning to a full-time work-from-home setup, [Brian Lough] threw together this web-enabled “do not disturb” beacon for his office door. The original idea was to simply provide a red light and a green light to let the rest of the family know when [Brian] would be in a meeting, but in an example of scope creep that turned out to be useful, [Mrs. Lough] rewrote the spec to include a button on the family-facing side so that she could alert him that his presence is requested.

[Brian] went through a couple of prototype using both an ESP32 and an ESP8266. We were rooting for the ESP32, which [Brian] was leveraging for its built-in capacitive touch input. That would have eliminated a physical button, but alas, the ESP8266 made it into the final build, along with lots and lots of Blu-Tack. The video below details the build and the code, and features an adorable Irish lesson as a bonus.

Yes, a simple text message would probably have satisfied the specs, but where’s the sport in that? Then again, as [Brian] points out, this build seemed oddly familiar for a good reason.

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