Each Christmas, [Adam Anderson], [Daniel Quach], and [Johan Wheeler] (going by ‘the Janky Jingle Crew’)—set themselves the challenge of outdoing their previous creations. Last year’s CH32 Fireplace brought an animated LED fire to life with CH32V003 microcontrollers. This year, they’ve gone a step further with the North Pole Circuit, a holiday project that combines magnetic […]
Let’s say you’ve got a fun little organization that does things together under a collective branding or banner. Maybe you want to celebrate that fact with some visually appealing signage? Well, that’s pretty much how [Jack] of the Purdue Hackers felt, so he and the gang put together a sizable logo sign to advertise their […]
Volumetric displays are simply cool. Throw some LEDs together, take advantage of persistence of vision, and you’ve really got something. [Nick Electronics] shows us how its done with his neat little volumetric lamp build. The concept is simple. [Nick] built a little device to spin a little rectangular array of LEDs. A small motor in […]
In 1983, a 14-year-old [Will] saw an LED clock in The Sharper Image store. At $250, it stayed in the store. That was a lot of money back then, especially for most teenagers. But [Will] didn’t forget. After high school, he and a friend planned to build one from scratch. They worked out how they […]
What color are the street lights in your town? While an unfortunate few still suffer under one of the awful colors offered by vapor discharge lamps, like the pink or orange of sodium or the greenish-white of mercury, most municipalities have moved to energy-saving LED streetlights, with a bright white light that’s generally superior in […]
Let’s say you’re going to a music festival. You could just take water, sunscreen, and a hat. Or, you could take a rad glowing witch’s staff to really draw some eyes and have some fun. [MZandtheRaspberryPi] recently undertook just such a build for a friend and we love how it turned out. The concept was […]
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, […]
One major flaw of designing societies around cars is the sheer amount of signage that drivers are expected to recognize, read, and react to. It’s a highly complex system that requires constant vigilance to a relatively boring task with high stakes, which is not something humans are particularly well adapted for. Modern GPS equipment can […]
IO user [monte] was pointed towards an 1898 display patent issued to a [George Mason] and liked the look of the ‘creepy’ font it defined. The layout used no less than 21 discrete segments to display the complete roman alphabet and numerals, which is definitely not possible with the mere seven segments we are all […]
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 […]