Personal Energy Orb Prevents Your Life From Being Swallowed By The Internets

September 25, 2012 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

We love the Internet, but we are definitely guilty of losing track of the time we spend traipsing around our virtual haunts. This project will not only remind you to get out and exercise, it will cripple your digital experience if you don’t heed its colorful warning.

[Janko Hofmann] calls it the Personal Energy Orb. It’s really just an Arduino and an RGB LED. But as with most creations, the idea is what makes it great. The orb has a dock next to your computer. It tracks how much time you spend online, changing colors as you rack up the hours. If you don’t heed the warning signs of overuse it will even start to slow down your mouse cursor. But never fear. Full functionality can be restored by topping off your personal energy. As you can see above, there’s also a docking station on [Janko’s] bicycle. The orb monitors your mileage, moving out of the red zone so that your computer will be unencumbered the next time you sit down for a long session of flash games. Don’t miss his video presentation embedded after the break.

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StarGate Eggbeater

September 24, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 5 Comments

[Jason] used a strip of 142 Adafruit LPD8806 Addressable RGB LEDs to create the StarGate Eggbeater persistence of vision display. The LED strips are controlled by an Arduino Mega, which is used to control the strip and provides 21 bit color control for each LED. The strip is housed into a ring-shaped tube which is mounted onto a rod and bearing to allow it to spin. A 1/4 HP motor is used to spin the ring at 250 RPM creating the POV effect.

One issue when controlling a spinning object is making electrical connections to a spinning object. The LPD8806 requires four connections: power, ground, clock, and data. To make the connections, [Jason] used a MOOG Slip Ring. This allows for the four connections to be made while the ring spins at 250 RPM.

Of course POV demos need videos, so check one out the “boss program” video after the break.

Via Adafruit

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Building A Driver For Absurdly High Power LEDs

August 30, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 26 Comments

A few years ago, the highest power LEDs you could buy capped out around three watts. Now, LED manufacturers are taking things to ridiculous power ratings with 30, 40, and even 90 watt LEDs. Getting these high-power LEDs are no longer a problem, but powering them certainly is. [Thomas] built a LED driver capable of powering these gigantic LEDs and creating a light show that is probably bright enough to cause bit of eye damage.

[Thomas]’ LED driver is based on Linear Technology’s LT3518 LED driver. This driver is part of a project to build a huge WiFi controlled RGB LED, so the driver has outputs for three separate LEDs capable of sourcing 700 mA each.

Because [Thomas] is dealing with crazy amounts of heat and power required to light up these huge LEDs, the driver board features a temperature sensor next to each LED driver. When the board gets too hot, the driver automatically shuts down, preventing bad things from happening.

You can check out a few pictures of [Thomas]’ LED driver over on the build page for his WiFi LED project. A truly awesome amount of lighting power here, that also makes it impossible to get a good picture of the board in operation.

A Wedding Cake Made Out Of LEDs

May 28, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

[Andrew] wanted to do something special for his wedding. Since he and his fiance [Missy] decided on a cupcake wedding cake, [Andrew] decided to wow his guests with an RGB LED cupcake holder.

The tiers of [Andrew] and [Missy]’s cupcake holder are made of acrylic laser etched with a damask pattern. These tiers are supported by a cylinder embedded with RGB leds that provide edge lighting for the acrylic panels. The effect is a series of permutating lights that illuminate the cupcake holder with every imaginable color. On the top of the cupcake cake, there’s a great cake topper made of frosted and laser cut acrylic that has the same color fade effect as the cupcake holder.

On the electrical side of things, the cupcake holder has 44 LEDs on all it’s levels. FETs driven by a 40-pin PIC18F control all the LEDs and the whole piece is powered by a computer power supply.

It’s an awesome build, especially considering it was finished just days before the wedding. After the break, you can check out a few more videos showing off the beauty of [Andrew] and [Missy]’s wedding cake.

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Reverse Engineering An RGB LED Remote

May 10, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

In the quest to add some mood lighting in his basement, [Mohonri] found an infrared wireless remote that is able to control several RGB LED strips. The only problem with this remote is the inability to control it via a wall-mount panel or even a computer. Obviously this would not stand for such a swank basement, so [Mohonri] did the reasonable thing and reverse engineered one of these remotes.

The build started with ripping the remote apart and figuring out how it ticks. [Mohonri] found the small IR LED transmitter and hooked up an oscilloscope to capture some data. After a bunch of trial and error and a big help from relevant documentation he had the entire button matrix – and thus the functions available to the LED strip – available to output via wall panel or computer.

[Mohonri] hasn’t completed his build yet; this was just the reverse engineering and documentation stage. Now, though, it shouldn’t be hard to control the RGB LED strips through an Arduino, a computer, or even an Android/iOS device with a small IR LED plugged into the headphone jack.

Building LED Walls On The Cheap

February 6, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Around this time last year, [KopfKopfKopfAffe] was enlisted as a set designer and was told to build some sort of light effects for electronic music parties. The budget for the project wasn’t much at 200 Euros, but he did manage to build decent 5×5 RGB LED matrix that is fully controllable by a computer.

[KopfKopfKopfAffe] didn’t have the time or money to wait for manufactured PCBs, so a bunch of perfboard was placed in a CNC mill with a pen to act as a plotter. All the lines that needed soldered were drawn on by the mill, a feat that probably saved hours of looking at the design before committing solder to iron.

A total of five boards were constructed, each one capable of controlling five RGB LEDs. Each board can be dasiy-chained with an RS-232 serial connection for further expansion. The only thing that’s needed to control the matrix is 17 bits that includes an address and RGB color data for each LED. The system only cost about 10 Euros per node, but we think that could be significantly reduced by leaving out the Molex and DB-9 connectors. [Kopf] project turned out very nice, check it out after the break.

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Controlling A Cute Ikea Night Light With Android On The Cheap

January 19, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 12 Comments

When [trandi]’s wife saw a cute night light at Ikea, she had to have it. She actually bought several of these for when her husband would inevitably crack one open and start tinkering with the microcontroller inside. The inevitable hack is pretty cool, and also gives us some ideas for interfacing with Android on the cheap.

The build started as an Ikea Spoka night light, an adorable anthropomorphized night light with a squishy silicone skin. Inside the Spoka are a dozen tri-color LEDs that [trandi] can cycle through with the push of a button. After deciding to control the lights inside the Spoka with an Android phone he reached for an IOIO Android breakout board. Fate intervened and [trandi] ended up with a ridiculously cheap Bluetooth modules that provides a simple serial connection to other Bluetooth devices.

The build reuses the blue, red, orange LEDs in the night light but replaces the no-name 8-pin micro with an ATtiny2313. [Trandi] wrote a small Android app to control the color over a Bluetooth serial connection. Check out his demo after the break.

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