Simple LED Project To Spice Up Your Halloween Party

October 26, 2014 by Rick Osgood 3 Comments

[Paul’s] project is a great example of how you can take a simple project and turn it into something more interesting. He built himself a jack-o-lantern with an Internet controlled RGB LED embedded inside.

[Paul] first wired up an RGB LED to a Raspberry Pi. He was sure to wire up each color using a 100ohm resistor to prevent the LED from burning out. The web interface was written in Python. The interface is pretty simple. It consists of three text fields. The user enters a value between 0 and 255 for each of the three LED colors. The program then lights up the LED accordingly.

[Paul] realized he would need a diffuser for the LED in order to really see the blended colors properly. Instead of using a common solution like a ping-pong ball, he opted to get festive and use a plastic jack-o-lantern. [Paul] removed the original incandescent bulb from the lantern and mounted the LED inside instead. The inside of the pumpkin is painted white, so it easily diffuses the light. The result is a jack-o-lantern that glows different colors as defined by his party guests. Be sure to check out the demonstration video below.

Webmote: Control Anything With Web-based Remote

December 14, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

control-anything-from-the-web

We’ve seen a lot of projects that let you control all of your devices from a smartphone. But this universal web-based remote control system looks like the most versatile we’ve seen yet. The project is called Webmote as the controls are served up as a web interface so that you’re not limited to say an Android device. The UI can be customized by choosing what buttons you will use and where to place them on the display. You can get a good feel for this by viewing this G+ album. Setup is made a bit easier thanks to an add-on system that has predefined layouts for common things like controlling XBMC.

The hardware seen above is the business end of Webmote. It’s an Arduino with an IR receiver, IR LED, and an XBee module. For your common home entertainment devices you can teach the system your codes using the IR receiver. The IR LED is used to transmit those codes back, and the Xbee gives you the ability to control X10 (home automation) devices. Right now the setup requires the hardware be connected to a server via USB, but it shouldn’t be hard to set up some type of wireless alternative.

Web-enabled Kinect

December 6, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 11 Comments

There are Kinect hacks out there for robot vision, 3D scanners, and even pseudo-LIDAR setups. Until now, one limiting factor to these builds is the requirement for a full-blown computer on the device to deal with the depth maps and do all the necessary processing and computation. This doesn’t seem like much of a problem since [wizgrav] published Intrael, an HTTP interface for the Kinect.

[Eleftherios] caught up to [wizgrav] at his local hackerspace where he did a short tutorial on Intrael. [wizgrav]’s project provides each frame from the Kinect over HTTP wrapped up in JSON arrays. Everything a Kinect outputs aside from sound is now easily available over the Internet.

The project is meant to put computer vision outside the realm of desktops and robotic laptops and into the web. [wizgrav] has a few ideas on what his project can be used for, such as smart security cameras and all kinds of interactive surfaces.

After the break, check out the Intrael primer [wizgrav] demonstrated (it’s Greek to us, but there are subtitles), and a few demos of what Intrael ‘sees.’

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Ego Box Monitors Web Hits

January 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Bogdan’s] latest project is a box that displays web hits for a chosen site. He calls it the Ego Box because depending on how traffic goes it either bloats or crushes your ego. This provides similar functionality as our Troll Sniffing Rat but the biggest difference is that this is a stand-alone Ethernet device. That’s thanks to the ENC28J60 Ethernet controller chip which manages the stack and has been quite popular in DIY electronic projects. In order to monitor your hits [Bogdan] crafted a bit of code to add to the header of your index page. It increments the counter file each time the page is loaded, and the Ego Box simply monitors that file, displaying the traffic on an eight digit 7 segment display.

[via Adafruit]

Abusing HTTP Status Codes

January 25, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 25 Comments

Concerns over privacy online are an ever growing theme. Every day we see people complaining about the policies of facebook and the like. [Mike Cardwell] points out another method of gleaning a bit of personal data from you that you may not have seen yet. By embedding a hidden image or using some really simple javascript, he can tell if you are currently logged into Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, or Digg. While this could possibly be used for more nefarious things, he points out that you could also use it for customizing your website to better suit the experience of the browser. For example, if the “reader” is already logged into Gmail, you could have any email links automatically open a gmail instance instead of the local mail client.

Internet Controlled Remote

September 10, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 41 Comments

How often does this happen to you? You’re leaving on a long trip, and half way there you remember the TV was left on. Never? Alright then, how about wanting to control an Xbox 360 from within the other room and you don’t have the remote. Still a rare occurrence?

Perhaps you have a better situation where an internet controlled IR remote, that can be programmed to work with any TV or IR accepting device, would be useful. [Nicholas McClanahan] starts off with USB Propeller from Parallax, adds an Ethernet module making a mini server, and ends with an IR LED and receiver. The code is nearly as simple being a combination of SPIN, Html, and JavaScript. All coming together under a nice website GUI that prompts for what IR signals to send. To make the project even more straightforward, [Nicholas] has included an Instructable as well. In the end though, while the hack is great, we’re still trying to find a decent enough use. Video after the rift.

Continue reading “Internet Controlled Remote” →

Web-enabled LED Pegboard

July 26, 2010 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

[Norm Santos] whipped up an LED light board that you can draw on through their web interface. We tried it out but unfortunately the live feed is currently offline. That doesn’t diminish our appreciation for the time-lapse build video after the break. Indeed it was a mountain of hot glueing and a couple of days of soldering. Our only beef is that for every LED on the board there are three empty peg holes. To us this is just begging to be augmented with blue, green, and white LEDs for a more spectacular result. What they have now encompases 350 LEDs managed by five microcontrollers, which took about two days to solder (for five people) and to hammer out some code. Continue reading “Web-enabled LED Pegboard” →