It is a pretty common first project to use an Arduino (or similar) to blink an LED. Which, of course, brings taunts of: you could have used a 555! You can, of course, also use any sort of oscillator, but [Mustafa] has a different approach. Blinking an LED with three resistors and a capacitor. Ok, […]
Sometimes, you see a project that isn’t a technical powerhouse but just looks so good you can’t help but think about duplicating it. That’s how we felt with the mini-neon signs made by [makerverse]. From an electronics point of view, it is just some filament LEDs and a 3D-printed casing. But, as you’ll see in […]
Sometimes, we build things with LEDs as indicator lamps or to illuminate something important. Sometimes, we build things with LEDs purely to glow and be beautiful. This interactive light toy from [Jens] falls into the latter category. The build uses a 16×16 addressable LED matrix. [Jens] then ported some “Bouncy Bubbles” Processing code from Keith […]
Neon lamps are fun to play with. These old-school indicators were once heavily utilized in many types of equipment for indication purposes but now seem largely relegated to mains voltage indication duties. Here’s a fun video by [Ashish Derhgaen], discussing the photoelectric effect of neon lamps with some simple demonstrations. Orange light makes it light! […]
We love close-up pictures of intricate work, and [w] hits the spot with a tiny joule thief in a fuse case (social media post, embedded below) powered by an old coin cell from a watch. It’s so tiny! Ethernet transformers contain tiny coils. A joule thief is a sort of minimum-component voltage booster that can […]
[mitxela] has a tiny problem, literally: some of his projects are so small as to defy easy programming. While most of us would probably solve the problem of having no physical space on a board to mount a connector with WiFi or Bluetooth, he took a different path and gave this clever light-based programming interface […]
[Paczkaexpress]’s RGB tree is a mix of clever building techniques and artistic form that come together into quite a beautiful sculpture. The branches of his tree are made from strands of enameled copper wire capped with an RGB LED and terminated in a female header. The separate wires are all wound and sculpted into the […]
It’s taken longer than some might have thought, but we’re finally at the point where you can pick up an SLA 3D printer for a few hundred bucks. These machines, which use light to cure a resin, are capable of far higher resolution than their more common FDM counterparts, though they do bring along their […]
LED cubes are all the rage right now, and rightly so given the amount of work that goes into them and the interesting things people find to do with them. Not content to make yet another position-sensitive display or an abstract design, though, [Greig Stewart] opted for something a bit more ambitious: an LED cube […]
On the Hackaday.io page for his gorgeous “Sunrise Alarm Clock”, [The Big One] is quick to point out that his design is only inspired by Japanese lanterns, and does not use authentic materials or traditional woodworking techniques. Perhaps that’s an important fact to some, but we’ll just say that the materials used seem far less […]