If you wanted to build an electronic dice, you might grab an Arduino and a nice OLED display to whip up something fancy. You could even choose an ESP32 and have it log your rolls to the cloud. Or, you could follow the lead of [Axiometa] and do it the old-school way. The build is […]
There are a few major companies out there building colorful LED panels you can stick on your wall for aesthetic purposes. Most commercial options are pretty expensive, and come with certain limitations in how they can be controlled. [Smart Solutions For Home] has whipped up a flexible DIY design for decorating your walls with light […]
The IKEA SMÅSNÖRE is a flexible silicone rod with an embedded LED strip, attached at each end to a base. It’s eye-catching enough, and it has the useful property of providing a diffuse light from multiple angles that makes it a promising candidate for a work lamp. That’s enough for [Daniel James] to create his […]
When Stranger Things premiered in 2016, it was a cultural force. Foreign DJs gushed over the lush 80s soundtrack, fashionistas loved the clothing, and the world became obsessed with the idea of using Christmas lights to communicate across material planes. [kyjohnso] has recreated that experience with the technology of today. If you haven’t watched the […]
Should you spend some time around the less scientifically informed parts of the internet, it’s easy to find “Free power” stories. Usually they’re some form of perpetual motion machine flying in the face of the laws of conservation of energy, but that’s not to say that there is no free power. The power just has […]
Over on the [Behind The Code with Gerry] YouTube channel our hacker [Gerry] shows us how to emulate a 74LS48 BCD-to-7-segment decoder/driver using an Altera CPLD Logic Chip From 1998. This is very much a das blinkenlights kind of project. The goal is to get a 7-segment display to count from 0 to 9, and […]
[Miroslav Hancar] wasn’t satisfied with abusing just a single component for our Component Abuse Challenge. He decided to abuse a whole assembly, in particular, some LED candles. In this project, LEDs are abused as temperature sensors. When the temperature gets hot enough for long enough, the microcontroller will turn on its LEDs. How? A diode’s […]
If you had an array of high power addressable LEDs, how would you project them onto a wall? Perhaps you’d use a Fresnel lens, or maybe an individual lens on the top of each. [Joo] faced this problem when making a lighting effect using just such an array, and the solution they came up with […]
Tagging wildlife is never straightforward in the best of times, but it becomes a great deal more complicated when you’re trying to track flying insects. Instead of trying to use a sensor package, [DeepSOIC] attached tiny, light retroreflectors to bees and hornets, then used a pulsed infrared light mounted on a drone to illuminate them. […]
Sometimes it’s fun to bring props from video games into the real world. [Hulk] has done just that with their latest Halloween build—creating a working replica of the lantern from Minecraft. Key to the build is the 3D printed enclosure, which faithfully mimics the look of the in-game item. By virtue of Minecraft’s simplistic visual […]