[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.
[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?
[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.
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.
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”
[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.
[Julien Bayle] has posted this great breakdown of building an RGB monome clone. He is a musical performer using Ableton Live. He wanted to do away with the need for a computer screen and found that the monome would have been perfect had it been RGB. So he decided to build his own.
The parts list for the entire project is as follows:
He also has files for the schematics and source code as well as information on how to assemble and test it.
The RGB aspect is still under development. He is using the LEDMatrix-Serial Interface-RGB from Sparkfun Electronics to run it. It is expensive, but is exactly what he was looking for.
There aren’t very many pictures of the project, and none of the working RGB unit. He makes up for it in sheer information. Many parts have links to manufacturers or support forums. Hopefully he’ll post some pictures and video of the final product soon.
