Wireless BlinkM Control

January 10, 2009 by Eliot 5 Comments

blinkm

[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.

Continue reading “Wireless BlinkM Control” →

A ShiftBrite Christmas

December 13, 2008 by Eliot 11 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PVC5jABuB8]

[Garrett] took 30 of his ShiftBrite modules and mounted them to his front fence for Christmas. The ShiftBrite is a serially addressable high output RGB LED. The individual modules are quite adept at applications like this where you’re stringing multiple lights together. They have identical buses on either side, specifically for daisychaining. The installation above looks great.

Composite Video Through Cat5

November 28, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 48 Comments

cat5_composite

[mixadj] needed to run some video cable from one part of his house to another. He was lacking the proper amount of video cable, but had a bunch of cat5 laying around. so he built a converter to run his composite signal through the cat5. He states that he wouldn’t run it more than 70 feet without amplifying the audio somehow. Aside from that, the performance is supposedly decent. This just adds to the multitude of other uses for that Ethernet cable. We’ve seen voice, data, composite video, VGA, and power. What else have you seen run over cat5?

Colorize Your Election Party

November 3, 2008 by Eliot 19 Comments

blue_red
[Eric] has put together a simple python script to scrape election results from CNN.com. It uses urllib2 to return the popular and electoral votes for each party and throws an ElectionWon exception when CNN calls the race. He’s planning on hooking this to DMX controlled RGB LED lighting that will shift to either blue or red as the night progresses. It’s a great starting point if you want to pull off something similar.

You may remember [Eric] for building the IKEA MAME table and the TRS-80 wireless terminal.

[photo: skenmy]

UPDATE: [Garrett] of macetech is putting the finishing touches on his version which uses 32 ShiftBrite modules and 2 4-digit displays controlled by a CuBLOC.

A Remote Controlled RGB Light Bulb Lamp

September 28, 2008 by Jason Rollette 9 Comments

RGB just got a lot brighter by using 3x60Watt flood lights instead of an LED. The bulbs are driven via TRIACs and the whole thing uses a remote control to change the levels of the three bulbs. It is also able to store these levels for later recall. The IR receiver was taken from a dead TV set along with its remote control, or a universal remote set to a Phillips TV can be used. The source code and schematic for this project are available.

LED Coffee Table

September 13, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

Spark Fun’s centerpiece at Maker Faire back in May was this LED coffee table. They just recently posted about how it was constructed. The surface is made from 64 8×8 RGB LED matrix boards totaling 4096 LEDs. The eight rows are connected to a custom router board so that one SPI line can control the entire display. The main microcontroller is an Olimex LPC2106 dev board. It runs a four player cooperative pong game where multiple balls are added over time. Each player gets a classic Atari paddle for control. You can see a video of the table running a screensaver after the break. Continue reading “LED Coffee Table” →

RGB Desktop Clock

September 1, 2008 by Eliot 11 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxZRCponks&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0][Mark Roy] designed this fine RGB LED desktop clock. It uses a PIC16F877A microcontroller and a DS1307N Real Time Clock. There is a ring of 12 RGB LEDs around the perimeter. Hours are indicated in red, minutes green, and seconds blue. If the hands overlap, the colors are mixed. Three buttons are used to set the time and it can run on as little as 0.7volts. You can find out more about the project on Stellar Core. He has plans to kit it in the future.