Once upon a time, someone set up a livestream wherein the messages from Twitch chat could control a game of Pokemon. Since then, we’ve seen Twitch control all sorts of things. If you’d like to have them play with some LEDs in your house, you might like this project from [pfeiffer3000]. The concept is simple […]
LED candles are neat, but they’re very suboptimal for wish-making: you can’t blow them out. Unless you take the circuit from [Andrea Console]’s latest project that lets you do just that, using only analog electronics— no microcontroller in sight. He’s using the known temperature-voltage behaviour of the LED for control here– sort of like the […]
Reading analog clocks is a pretty straightforward skill to learn. However, if you’ve already learned to read and don’t want to pick up the extra skill, a word clock is a perfect solution for telling time. [povey_tech] found some nice examples in the wild but didn’t appreciate the price, so he set about building his […]
The WS2812B has become one of the most popular addressable LEDs out there. They’re easy to drive from just about any microcontroller you can think of. But what if you have a microcontroller at all? [Povilas Dumcius] decided to try and drive the LEDs with raw logic only. The project consists of a small board […]
Climbing is a cool sport. With that said, like everything, it’s even better if you integrate lots of glowing colorful LEDs. To that end, [Superbender] worked up this fun climbing wall that features interactive lighting built right in. Structurally, there’s nothing too wild going on here. It’s a wood-framed climbing structure that stands 10 meters […]
If you’ve been to a wedding or a downtown coffee shop in the last 10 years, you’ve probably seen those little lightboxes that are so popular these days. They consist of letters placed on a plastic frame in front of a dim white light, and they became twee about five minutes after your hipster friend […]
For a little over two thousand years, the primary light sources after the sun had set were oil lamps and candles. This was well before the age of fossil fuels, so these oil lamps were often fueled with a labor-intensive agricultural product like olive oil. Candles were similarly difficult to make, made from tallow, beeswax, […]
Once upon a time, the cathode ray tube was pretty much the only type of display you’d find in a consumer television. As the analog broadcast world shifted to digital, we saw the rise of plasma displays and LCDs, which offered greater resolution and much slimmer packaging. Then there was the so-called LED TV, confusingly […]
LED lighting is now commonplace across homes, businesses, and industrial settings. It uses little energy and provides a great deal of light. However, a new study suggests it may come with a trade-off. New research suggests human vision may not perform at its peak under this particular form of illumination. The study ran with a […]
When it comes to electromagnetic waves, humans can really only directly perceive a very small part of the overall spectrum, which we call “visible light.” [rootkid] recently built an art piece that has perception far outside this range, turning invisible waves into a visible light sculpture. The core of the device is the HackRF One. […]