ws2812

134 Articles

Ask Hackaday: What About The Diffusers?

April 25, 2017 by 82 Comments

Blinky LED projects: we just can’t get enough of them. But anyone who’s stared a WS2812 straight in the face knows that the secret sauce that takes a good LED project and makes it great is the diffuser. Without a diffuser, colors don’t blend and LEDs are just tiny, blinding points of light. The ideal diffuser scrambles the photons around and spreads them out between LED and your eye, so that you can’t tell exactly where they originated.

We’re going to try to pay the diffuser its due, and hopefully you’ll get some inspiration for your next project from scrolling through what we found. But this is an “Ask Hacakday”, so here’s the question up front: what awesome LED diffusion tricks are we missing, what’s your favorite, and why?

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Interactive Board Prompts Moves For Checkers And Chess

April 16, 2017 by 6 Comments

In terms of equipment, chess and checkers are simple games — just a handful of pieces and a checkered gameboard. The simplicity belies the underlying complexity of the games, though, and goes a long way toward explaining their popularity over the millennia.

Increasing the complexity with an interactive game board for chess and checkers might seem counterintuitive, then. But [Bogdan Berg]’s project aims to not only teach checkers and chess but to make games a little more exciting and engaging. Looking a little like a tabletop version of the interactive dance floors we’ve been seeing a lot of lately, the board is built from laser-cut acrylic with plywood dividers to isolate all 64 squares. Neopixels and Hall-effect sensors are mounted to custom PCBs that stretch the length of a row and are wired to an Arduino Mega with lots of IO. Game pieces are colorful fridge magnets. [Bogdan]’s current program supports checkers and keeps track of where the pieces have been moved relative to their starting position and prompts users with possible legal moves.

[Bogdan]’s board already looks like a lot of fun in the video below, and we like the quality of the build and the unobtrusive nature of the interactivity. When he gets around to implementing chess, though, he might want something fancier than fridge magnets for game pieces.

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Build Your Own Animated Turn Signals

March 13, 2017 by 79 Comments

Automotive lighting used to be strictly controlled, particularly in the United States — anyone remember sealed beam headlamps? These days, pretty much anything goes. You can even have an animated turn signal, because a simple flash isn’t fancy enough these days. You can get a scanning-LED turn signal on your new model Audi, among others. [Shravan] wanted this on their Mazda and set about building an animated turn signal and daytime running lights setup for their car.

It’s not a complicated build by any means; an off-the-shelf WS2812B strip provides the blinkums, an Arduino Nano the smarts. Using a modified library to drive the LEDs allowed [Shravan] to get things running with a minimum of fuss. We’d love to see a little more of the gritty reality of this build — how the Nano is getting directional signals from the car, and how it’s all wired up and bolted on. When you’re installing custom hardware onto a vehicle, the devil really is in the details. It’s supremely difficult to create something that looks tidy and functions well.

It’s amazing to think about how far we’ve come. When high-brightness LEDs first came on to the market in the 1990s, you would have been on the hook for wiring your own loom to connect the 20+ LEDs, building your own driver circuitry, and likely etching a custom PCB — all the while you programmed a PIC in assembly as it dangled off a parallel-port programmer. But then again, our cave-dwelling ancestors didn’t even have matches. Time marches on. Use today’s technology to build the very best things you can.

We love seeing car mods, particularly those that are well executed. Check out [Dave]’s interior lighting mods to the Nissan Juke — a car this writer has weighty opinions about. Video after the break.

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The Smartest Smart Watch Is The One You Make Yourself

March 13, 2017 by 10 Comments

If you’re building a smart watch these days (yawn!), you’ve got to have some special sauce to impress the jaded Hackaday community. [Dominic]’s NeoPixel SmartWatch delivers, with his own take on what’s important to have on your wrist, and just as importantly, what isn’t.

There’s no fancy screen. Instead, the watch gets by with a ring of NeoPixels for all its notification needs. But notification is what it does right. It tells [Dominic] when he’s got an incoming call of course, but also has different flashing color modes for SMS, Snapchat, and e-mail. Oh yeah, and it tells time and even has a flashlight mode. Great functionality for a minimalistic display.

But that’s not all! It’s also got a light sensor that works from the UV all the way down to IR. At the moment, it’s being used to automatically adjust the LED brightness and to display current UV levels. (We imagine turning this into a sunburn alarm mode.) Also planned is a TV-B-Gone style IR transmitter.

The hardware is the tough part of this build, and [Dominic] ended up using a custom PCB to help in cramming so many off-the-shelf modules into a tiny space. Making it look good is icing on the cake.

Thanks [Marcello] for the tip!

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NeoJoints Make WS2812 LEDs Even More Fun

March 12, 2017 by 19 Comments

What’s more fun than individually addressable RGB LEDs? Many, many individually addressable RGB LEDs. What’s more fun than all the miscellaneous soldering involved in connecting many of these cheap and cheerful strips together? Well, basically anything. But in particular, these little widgets that [todbot] designed help make connecting up strips of RGB LEDs a snap.

[todbot]’s connectors aren’t particularly groundbreaking, but they’re one of those things that you need the moment you first lay eyes on them. And they’re a testament to rapid prototyping: the mounting holes and improved routing patterns evolved as [todbot] made some, soldered them up, mounted them, and then made some more. We’d like to see some odd angles, of course, but that shouldn’t be too hard to arrange. Everything is up on GitHub, so you can go check it out.

Of course, necessity is the mother of invention, and she’s got many kids. Which is to say that we’ve seen a variation of this hack before precisely because other folks have stared at this matrix-of-strips problem before and come up with similar solutions. Still, we really like the mounting holes and overall aesthetic of [todbot]’s solution, and if you ever find yourself joining WS2812 strips together, give it a try.

Closer Look At Everyone’s Favorite Blinky

March 10, 2017 by 18 Comments

Admit it, you love looking at silicon die shots, especially when you have help walking through the functionality of all the different sections. This one’s really easy for a couple of reasons. [electronupdate] pointed his microscope at the die on a WS2812.

The WS2812 is an addressible RGB LED that is often called a Neopixel (a brand name assigned to it by Adafruit). The part is packaged in a 5×5 mm housing with a clear window on the front. This lets you easily see the diodes as they are illuminated, but also makes it easy to get a look at the die for the logic circuit controlling the part.

This die is responsible for reading data as it is shifted in, shifting it out to the next LED in the chain, and setting each of the three diodes accordingly. The funcitonality is simple which makes it a lot easier to figure out what each part of the die contributes to the effort. The diode drivers are a dead giveaway because a bonding wire connected to part of their footprint. It’s quite interesting to hear that the fourth footprint was likely used in testing — sound off in the comments if you can speculate on what those tests included.

We had no trouble spotting logic circuitry. This exploration doesn’t drill down to the gate level like a lot of [Ken Shirriff’s] silicon reverse engineering but the process that [electronupdate] uses is equally fun. He grabs a tiny solar cell and scopes it while the diodes are running to pick up on the PWM pattern used to fade each LED. That’s a neat little trick to keep in your back pocket for use in confirming your theories about clock rate and implementation when reverse engineering someone else’s work.

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Making A Mega LED Desk

March 2, 2017 by 37 Comments

Few things beat a sturdy, home-built desk — especially when it’s jam-packed with over 1200 WS2812 LEDs.

[nolobot] and his bother struggled with setting up and squaring-off the t-slotted, extruded aluminium frame which makes up the desk. He recommends practicing with a smaller frame for anyone else attempting a similar build. The surface of the desk has a few inches between the polycarbonate top and the 1/4″ plywood painted black serving as the substrate for the LEDs. Those LEDs come in strip form but still required several hundred solders, and wiring headaches in an attempt to make future upgrades manageable. Dozens of support bolts with adjustable feet support the desk surface throughout. These all had to be individually adjusted and can be made out if you look closely at the demo videos.

An Arduino Mega controls the LEDs with the help of the FastLED library. Custom code was necessary because one of the major issues [nolobot] faced was the power draw. 1200 LEDs at 5V draw quite a bit of current, so the LEDs were coded to peak at about 50% brightness. The matrix was split into different banks, while also limiting the 40A PSU to only 15A.

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