[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.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q38NxsKetgo]
Here’s a cool tip, sent in by [Martin]. He has put together this very compact package for an animated 8×8 RGB LED array with a tiny footprint. It is controlled by an ATMega16 powered by 2 small lithium cells. While it may not be quite as small as the space invader button, it seems to have a bit more animation horsepower.
[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”
[Markus] noticed a lack of 7 segment LED displays that could show RGB. Like any hacker, he sought to remedy this. The solution he came up with was to basically remove all the electronics from the plastic body of the display. He then mounted new surface mount RGB LEDs in the correct places. This may be a bit messy, and definitely increased the footprint in this layout, but as you can see from the pictures on his site, the final result is quite nice. What uses can you think of for these?
Here’s another nerdy present that was built for Valentine’s Day. [João Silva] created a temperature sensing Munny. A Munny is a vinyl toy made to be customized. Other than these Munny speakers, we haven’t seen them in many electronics projects. The LM35CZ temperature sensor has an analog output that connects to the ADC on the ATtiny15L. The microcontroller changes the RGB LED’s color based on the temperature: blue for cold, green for comfortable, and red for hot. It only flashes every three minutes to conserve the power in the coin cells. His one-off circuit board also includes an ISP header for programming. The Munny’s head looks like it does a great job diffusing the light.
SparkFun has been selling button pad parts for some time and we used them in our RGB door lock project. A excellent part, but you needed to implement your own interface to use the boards. SparkFun has just released two additional versions to make it easier on builders. The first is their Button Pad Controller USB. It has a 4×4 grid of buttons lit by RGB LEDs and a USB interface. This board can be expanded using the Button Pad Controller SPI. The SPI bus means it should be easy to add the button pad to embedded projects. This newest release puts you much closer to building your own RGB monome clone or other custom controller than ever before. The unit pictured above is their own project and they have no plans on selling anything like it.
[John] has been working with several BlinkM RGB devices. He’s created a controller to talk to each of the BlinkMs wirelessly and change their behavior. The core is an old relay tester box used to test telephone circuits. Each of its four knobs are connected to the analog inputs on the Arduino. The signal is transmitted using RFlink devices. Each BlinkM is paired with an ATmega168 and receiver. The control box also has a switch to send the same signal to all of the devices at the same time. The transmit and receive code are available on his site. You can find a video of it embedded below.
