Custom Massive LED Panel Lights Up The Party

November 30, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

giant-led-sign

The guys at BuildLounge wrote us to share a giant LED sign they came across in the submission pile for their “Win a Laser Cutter” contest that’s currently under way. [Stephen Shaffer] helps run a huge party called Fantastic Planet, for which the group typically outsources the lighting arrangements. They got tired of hiring light guys several times a year and built their own mega display for the festivities instead.

The LED sign consists of 1,474 LEDs that output well over 10,000 lumens. The sign was produced for just about $800, which is very reasonable for a display of its size. The whole thing is controlled by a pair of Arduinos paired with 34 MIC5891 shift registers, all mounted on custom designed PCBs that the group produced in-house.

The display looks great, but don’t take our word for it – check out the video below to see it in action.

If you are interested in taking a closer look at how it was built, swing by the build thread to see more details.

Continue reading “Custom Massive LED Panel Lights Up The Party” →

Arduino Helps You Ski Copper

February 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Dwight’s] been working on a long-term project to add a status board for the ski runs at Copper Mountain ski resort. The board will feature an 8×8 LED module for each run that displays a green O for open trails, a green G for groomed trails, and a red X for closed trails. He’s also got a status board with LEDs embedded in a trail map.

The system relies on SPI for each LED module. An Arduino Mega uses a Xbee module to pull down XML data wirelessly and display it on this board. Since the trail report is already available online it’s just a matter of parsing the data in a useful way.

He’s not quite done with the whole thing yet, but keep an eye out for it if you are planning to ski Copper Mountain.

[via Tom’s Guide]

Peggy2 X2, With Video

December 19, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ImjfHxXGfc]

Being avid fanatics of flashing lights, we always love to see the peggy2 in action. The video above shows another improvement, which is two peggy2 units working together as one. [iservice2000] chained the two together and wrote new code for the display. Using an Arduino to drive it all, he has gotten them to act as one. While video on the peggy2 isn’t new, this is the first time we’ve seen two of them chained together. The end result is going to be a scrolling sign that can be updated via the web, or that can display tweets. We did notice a bit of tearing, is that from the camera or the software?

[via littlebirdceo]