Some Useful Notes On The 6805-EC10 Addressable RGB LED

March 12, 2025 by Dave Rowntree 9 Comments

LEDs are getting smaller and smaller, and the newest generations of indexable RGB LEDs are even fiddlier to use than their already diminutive predecessors. [Alex Lorman] has written some notes about the minuscule SK6805-EC10 series of LEDs, which may be helpful to those wanting to learn how to deal with these in a more controlled manner.

Most hardware types will be very familiar with the 5050-sized devices, sold as Neopixels in some circles, which are so-named due to being physically 5.0 mm x 5.0 mm in the horizontal dimensions. Many LEDs are specified by this simple width by depth manner. As for addressable RGB LEDs (although not all addressable LEDs are RGB, there are many weird and wonderful combinations out there!) the next most common standard size down the scale is the 2020, also known as the ‘Dotstar.’ These are small enough to present a real soldering challenge, and getting a good placement result needs some real skills.

[Alex] wanted to use the even smaller EC10 or 1111 devices, which measure a staggering 1.1 mm x 1.1 mm! Adafruit’s product page mentions that these are not intended for hand soldering, but we bet you want to try! Anyway, [Alex] has created a KiCAD footprint and a handy test PCB for characterizing and getting used to handling these little suckers, which may help someone on their way. They note that hot air reflow soldering needs low temperature paste (this scribe recommends using MG Chemicals branded T3 Sn₄₂Bi₅₇Ag₁ paste in this application) and a very low heat to avoid cracking the cases open. Also, a low air flow rate to prevent blowing them all over the desk would also be smart. Perhaps these are more suited to hot plate or a proper convection oven?

As a bonus, [Alex] has previously worked with the slightly larger SK6805-1515 device, with some good extra notes around an interesting nonlinearity effect and the required gamma correction to get good colour perception. We’ll leave that to you readers to dig into. Happy soldering!

We’ve not yet seen many projects using these 1111 LEDs, but here’s one we dug up using the larger 1515 unit.

A chicken's egg with many holes glows beneath a glass globe set atop an inverted wooden bowl.

Glowing Egg Is A One-Oeuf Solution For Tracking Cycles

September 7, 2024 by Kristina Panos 28 Comments

Look, if something happened to you every three weeks or so to basically turn you into a different person and factored heavily into whether any new humans were created, you’d probably want to keep abreast of the schedule, yeah? Yeah. So, while there are, of course, a ton of ways to do this with your phone, most of those apps do gross things with your data. Are you angry yet?

[Jakoba the Online Witch] certainly was, or if not angry, at least annoyed. So she built a glowing egg timer, which shines a different color based on current point in her cycle, to let her know when she is fertile and expecting Aunt Flo.

The coolest part is that this is an actual egg from one of [Jakoba]’s backyard chickens. No. The coolest part is how she was able to make so many holes without breaking it. (It took four tries.)

After bleaching the insides, the egg was ready to glow. As [Jakoba] says, the guts are simple — just a Wemos D1 Mini ESP8266, a WS2812 LED, and a heatsink. The enclosure consists of an inverted peanut bowl with a glass ornament hot-glued in place.

Once it was put together, all she had to do was add it in Home Assistant and use the current calendar state to trigger services from the YAML configuration.

Would you prefer an on-body solution? Here’s an earring that tracks temperature.

RGB LED Disco Ball Reacts To Sound And Color

March 5, 2024 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

Although disco music and dancing may be long dead, the disco ball lives on as a staple of dance parties everywhere. [Tim van de Vathorst] spent a considerable amount of time reinventing the disco ball into something covered with RGB LEDs that reacts to sound and uses a color sensor to change hue based on whatever it’s presented with.

[Tim] started by modeling the disco ball after a soccer ball with a mixture of pentagons and hexagons. Then it was off to the laser cutter to cut it out of 3mm plywood sheets. Once assembled, [Tim] added LED strips across all the faces and wired them up. Then it was time to figure out how to hold the guts together inside of the ball. Back to the drawing board and laser cutter [Tim] went to design a simple two-piece skeleton to hold the Raspberry Pi and the power supply.

In order to do some of the really interesting effects, [Tim] had to make sure that the faces were divvied up correctly in code. That was difficult and involved a really big array, but the result looks worth the trouble. Finally, [Tim] covered the ball in white acrylic to diffuse the LEDs. As you will see in the build/demo video after the break, the ball turned out really well. The only real problem is that the camera doesn’t work very well without light, which is something good parties are usually short on. [Tim] might add a spotlight or something in the future.

Do you prefer the mirrored look of the standard disco ball? Peep the tiny one in this Disco Containment Unit.

Continue reading “RGB LED Disco Ball Reacts To Sound And Color” →

Giant LED Matrix Fills Blank Space In The Kitchen

October 9, 2023 by Richard Baguley 8 Comments

We’ve all got one: a blank space somewhere in our home that we don’t know what to do with. [James Miller] had one above his kitchen cabinets, so he filled it with a giant LED matrix. The result is a large but surprisingly attractive LED screen that can send messages, provide illumination, or while away the idle hours of the night playing Conway’s Game of Life.

[James] built the matrix using the usual suspect for these builds: several strings of WS2812 lights . He initially ran this from a Raspberry Pi, but realized that there was no need for such a dizzying amount of computing power, so he switched to an ESP32 instead. The frame is built from wood and foam board.

The first version he built used a fabric diffuser, but after a close encounter with a flaming steak, he switched over to commercial ceiling light diffusers cut down to size. We might have been tempted to keep going and try an “egg crate” style ceiling light panel for a the smaller pixel size, but [James] thinks he has reached the “good enough” point of this project. It’s certainly a fun build, and it looks very cool with minimal materials.

Continue reading “Giant LED Matrix Fills Blank Space In The Kitchen” →

A black work mat holds a circular badge with 64 addressable LEDs in a spiraling shape akin to the center of a sunflower. The LEDs have a rotating rainbow spiraling around the circle with red touching violet on one end. The colors extend in bands from the center to the rim of the circle.

Math You Can Wear: Fibonacci Spiral LED Badge

June 14, 2023 by Navarre Bartz 8 Comments

Fibonacci numbers are seen in the natural structures of various plants, such as the florets in sunflower heads, areoles on cacti stems, and scales in pine cones. [HackerBox] has developed a Fibonacci Spiral LED Badge to bring this natural phenomenon to your electronics.

To position each of the 64 addressable LEDs within the PCB layout, [HackerBox] computed the polar (r,θ) coordinates in a spreadsheet according to the Vogel model and then converted them to rectangular (x,y) coordinates. A little more math translates the points “off origin” into the center of the PCB space and scale them out to keep the first two 5 mm LEDs from overlapping. Finally, the LED coordinates were pasted into the KiCad PCB design file.

An RP2040 microcontroller controls the show, and a switch on the badge selects power between USB and three AA batteries and a DC/DC boost converter. The PCB also features two capacitive touch pads. [HackerBox] has published the KiCad files for the badge, and the CircuitPython firmware is shared with the project. If C/C++ is more your preference, the RP2040 MCU can also be programmed using the Arduino IDE.

For more details on beautiful RGB lights, we’ve previously presented Everything You Might Have Missed About Addressable LEDs, and for more details on why they can be so fun to wear, check out our Hackaday Badgelife Documentary.

(Editor’s note: HackerBox makes and sells kits, is run by Hackaday Contributor [Joseph Long] IRL.)

Continue reading “Math You Can Wear: Fibonacci Spiral LED Badge” →

A 4-Player Arcade Hidden Inside A Coffee Table

May 11, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 3 Comments

[Ed] from 50% Awesome on YouTube wanted to build a retro gaming system with a decent screen size, but doesn’t have a great deal of space to site it in, so a good compromise was to make a piece of useful furniture and hide all the fun parts inside.

Building an arcade machine usually involves a lot of wiring

This video two-part build log shows a lot of woodwork, with a lot of mistakes (happy accidents, that are totally fine) made along the way, so you do need to repeat them. Essentially it’s a simple maple-veneered plywood box, with a thick lid section hosting the display and some repositioned speakers. This display is taken from a standard LG TV with the control PCB ripped out. The power button/IR PCB was prised out of the bezel, to be relocated, as were the two downwards-facing speakers. The whole collection of parts was attached to a front panel, with copious hot glue, we just hope the heavy TV panel was firmly held in there by other means!

Continue reading “A 4-Player Arcade Hidden Inside A Coffee Table” →

Hackaday Prize 2023: Uno Plus+ Updates A Classic

May 11, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 19 Comments

As an introduction to embedded electronics and programming in a straightforward environment, there isn’t much out there that can hold a torch to the Arduino Uno. Cheap (especially if you count the clones), easy to find, and quick to deploy, with countless support libraries, it’s a go-to for many a hack. This scribe simply can’t remember how many he’s bought, hacked, and deployed over the years. But can it be improved? [John Loeffler] thinks so, and his 2023 Hackaday Prize entry, the Uno Plus+ could be the one.

If this is too much bling for you, there is a version with LEDs adjacent to non-illuminated headers.

After clearing the top deck of extraneous components (by shoving them on the bottom) there was much more space to expand the header labeling, so there can be no accidental misplacement of those DuPont wires this thing will inevitably sprout randomly.

The board also has an additional Stemma/Qwiic connector and a Neopixel LED for indication duties. Also sitting on the PCB bottom are a ton of opamps, to drive the header indicators. Yes, this board has a full set of colour-coded LED bling indicators, showing the logical state of each and every pin on all headers, giving an easy way to check the desired activity is occurring. Plus it looks cool. Illuminated headers? YES!

Think the Uno too light on resources to perform any meaningful modern workloads? Think again!