Neopixels

34 Articles

RGB Lamp With Micro:Bit Powered Gesture Control

September 20, 2019 by 2 Comments

The Micro:bit is a very neat piece of hardware that, frankly, we don’t see enough of. Which made us all the more interested when [Manoj Nathwani] wrote in to tell us about the gorgeous 3D printed RGB LED lamp he created that uses the BBC-endorsed microcontroller to perform basic gesture detection. Purists will likely point out that an Arduino Pro Mini is tagging along to handle interfacing with the LEDs, but it’s still a good example of how quick you can get a project up and running with MicroPython on the Micro:bit.

[Manoj] used eight NeoPixel Sticks, a NeoPixel Ring, and a few scraps of perfboard to construct a three dimensional “bulb” to fill the void inside the printed diffuser. They’re chained together so all the elements appear as a single addressable strip, which made the rest of the project a bit easier to implement. It might not be pretty, but it gets the job done and it’s not like you’ll ever see it again once installed in the lamp anyway.

The Micro:bit and Arduino co-pilot live in the base of the lamp, and the single USB cable to provide power (and the ability to update the device’s firmware) is run out the bottom to give the whole thing a clean and professional look. For those wondering why the Arduino has tagged along, [Manoj] says he couldn’t get the NeoPixel libraries to play nicely with the Micro:bit so he’s using the Arduino essentially as a mediator.

Right now the only gesture that’s detected on the Micro:bit is a simple shake, which tells the Arduino to toggle the light show on and off. But in the future, [Manoj] plans to implement more complex gestures which will trigger different animations. As he explains in the blog post, gesture recognition with the Micro:bit is incredibly simple, so it should be easy to come up with a bunch of unique ways to interface with the lamp.

Color changing LED lamps are a favorite project of hackers, and we’ve seen examples built with everything from glass and copper to laser-cut pieces of wood and veneer. While you might prefer to skip the gesture control for an ESP8266 and UDP, we think this project is another strong entry into this popular genre.

Individual Neopixels Make Up This Lightsaber’s Blade

August 9, 2019 by 7 Comments

The lightsaber is an iconic weapon from the Star Wars franchise, designed in all sorts of shapes and colors. Several fan-made versions have been built as well, quite a few of which use the almost ubiquitous neopixel. [Tirenoth] decided to build his first lightsaber using a series of neopixels, but decided on a unique build method.

Instead of the usual strip of neopixels, [Tirenoth] chose to use a bunch of neopixels in the 5mm LED form-factor. [Tirenoth] soldered each LED’s 5v pins and GND pins to the same pins on the next, rotating each LED 180 degrees, building a tower of pixels. The data in and out pins are soldered to the next (and previous) LED as well. This allows the series of LEDs to be a bit more stable physically, and allows them to be stacked close together, one on top of the other.

To control the neopixels, a Proffieboard is used, an open-source lightsaber controller. The Proffieboard uses an STM32 microcontroller and allows you to hook up LEDs or neopixels as well as a speaker. Its open-source software allows the animation of the pixels and the playing of sounds. It’s designed specifically for lightsaber builds and is programmed via the Arduino IDE.

[Tirenoth] has some nice pictures of the build in process and, of course some nice pics of the final result. He suggests that the blade would be the first to break in battle, though. There’s been a few lightsaber builds over the years, like this lightsaber with rave mode, or this lightsaber made with real lasers.

via Reddit.

Mademoiselle Pinball Table Gets Rock ‘n Roll Makeover

July 13, 2018 by 11 Comments

Once upon a time, there was a music venue/artist collective/effects pedal company that helped redefine industry in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. That place was called Death By Audio. In 2014, it suffered a death by gentrification when Vice Media bought the building that DBA had worked so hard to transform. From the ashes rose the Death By Audio Arcade, which showcases DIY pinball cabinets made by indie artists.

Their most recent creation is called A Place To Bury Strangers (APTBS). It’s built on a 1959 Gottlieb Mademoiselle table and themed around a local noise/shoegaze band of the same name that was deeply connected to Death By Audio. According to [Mark Kleeb], this table is an homage to APTBS’s whiz-bang pinball-like performance style of total sensory overload. Hardly a sense is spared when playing this table, which features strobe lights, black lights, video and audio clips of APTBS, and a fog machine. Yeah.

[Mark] picked up this project from a friend, who had already cut some wires and started hacking on it. Nearly every bit of the table’s guts had to be upgraded with OEM parts or else replaced entirely. Now there’s a Teensy running the bumpers, and another Teensy on the switches. An Arduino drives the NeoPixel strips that light up the playfield, and a second Uno displays the score on those sweet VFD tubes. All four micros are tied together with Python and a Raspi 3.

If you’re anywhere near NYC, you can play the glow-in-the-dark ball yourself on July 15th at Le Poisson Rouge. If not, don’t flip—just nudge that break to see her in action. Did we mention there’s a strobe light? Consider yourself warned.

Want to get into DIY pinball on a smaller scale? Build yourself a sandbox and start playing.

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CalClock Keeps You Tied To The Mast

June 8, 2018 by 3 Comments

Now that most of what we do revolves around our phones and/or the internet, it’s nearly impossible to take a short break from work to check the ol’ calendar without being lured by the sirens on the shore of social media. Well, [samvanhook] was tired of being drawn in when all he really needs is a vague idea of what’s coming up for him in the next 12 hours. Enter the CalClock.

Thanks to color-coded segments, [sam] can tell at a glance if he has something coming up soon in Google Calendar, or if he can dive back into work. When nothing is scheduled, the segments are simply unlit.

We love the mid-century minimal look and craftsmanship of CalClock. This beauty runs on a Raspi Zero W, which fetches the 411 through the gooCal API and lights up the appropriate NeoPixels arrayed behind standard clock movement-driven hands.  [sam] could have diffused the NeoPixels with a single sheet of acrylic, but he went the extra mile to route and sand little acrylic ice cubes for all 24 segments.

Want more control of your day? [sam] took the time to upload both the clock face model and the code so you can. If you need help just getting started each day, check out this calendar-polling Raspi alarm clock.

Bumblebee Breakout, A DIY Wearable Connector

March 18, 2018 by 16 Comments

The practice of developing wearable electronics offers a lot of opportunity for new connector designs and techniques for embedding electronics. Questions like these will eventually come up: How will this PCB attach to that conductive fabric circuit reliably? What’s the best way to transition from wire to this woven conductive trim? What’s the best way to integrate this light element into this garment while still maintaining flexibility?

Mika Satomi and Hannah-Perner Wilson of Kobakant are innovators in this arena and inspire many with their prolific documentation while they ask themselves questions similar to these. Their work is always geared towards accessibility and the ability to recreate what they have designed. Their most recent documented connector is one they call the Bumblebee Breakout. It connects an SMD addressable RGB LED, such as Adafruit’s Neopixel, to a piece of side glow fiber optic 1.5mm in diameter. On a short piece of tubing, the four pads of the SMD LED are broken out into four copper rings giving it the look of a striped bumblebee. To keep from shorts occurring while wrapping the copper tape contacts around the tube, they use Kapton tape to isolate each layer as they go.

This connector was originally created to be used in a commission they did out of Koba, their e-textile tailor shop located in Berlin. Fiber optics were applied to jackets for a performance called “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” produced by the Puppetry Department of the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch.

Peruse more e-textiles techniques and learn how to build a connector transitioning from an embroidered thread bus to a wire and how to knit solderable circuit boards. And make sure to click around Kobakant’s website, it’s full of e-textile DIY tutorials! 

Pi Time – A Fabric RGB Arduino Clock

April 16, 2017 by 4 Comments

Pi Time is a psychedelic clock made out of fabric and Neopixels, controlled by an Arduino UNO. The clock started out as a quilted Pi symbol. [Chris and Jessica] wanted to make something more around the Pi and added some RGB lights. At the same time, they wanted to make something useful, that’s when they decided to make a clock using Neopixels.

Neopixels, or WS2812Bs, are addressable RGB LEDs , which can be controlled individually by a microcontroller, in this case, an Arduino. The fabric was quilted with a spiral of numbers (3.1415926535…) and the actual reading of the time is not how you are used to. To read the clock you have to recall the visible color spectrum or the rainbow colors, from red to violet. The rainbow starts at the beginning of the symbol Pi in the center, so the hours will be either red, yellow, or orange, depending on how many digits are needed to tell the time. For example, when it is 5:09, the 5 is red, and the 9 is yellow. When it’s 5:10, the 5 is orange, the first minute (1) is teal, and the second (0) is violet. The pi symbol flashes every other second.

There are simpler and more complicated ways to perform the simple task of figuring out what time it is…

We are not sure if the digits are lighted up according to their first appearance in the Pi sequence or are just random as the video only shows the trippy LEDs, but the effect is pretty nice:

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Jenkins Lights The Christmas Tree

December 27, 2016 by 5 Comments

Jenkins is open-source automation software that tries to automate parts of the software development process. When you submit code, for example, Jenkins will grab it, build the project with it and run any tests on it. If you have a large number of people submitting new code or data, Jenkins will wait and grab a bunch of the submissions to build. Depending on the size of the project, this can take a while, and if there’s a problem, you need to know quickly so that people aren’t waiting on a broken build. Email’s fine for this, but [dkt01] saw one of the desktop LED Christmas tree projects on Hackaday, and integrated it into his Jenkins system.

Like the other projects, WS2812b LED rings are used as the tree, and an Arduino Pro Mini runs the show, with an Ethernet LAN Module to communicate with the Python script that monitors the Jenkins build job. The Python script sends commands to the Arduino, which in turn lights up the LEDs. They light up green on a successful build and red if something fails, but during the build process, the LEDs show the current state of the build, tracking Jenkins’ progress as it builds.

Our previous Jenkins post used a big, red LED light that would light up if the build failed. [dkt01]’s build lets you know if the build is successful or has failed, but the build progress is a great addition.

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