Low power LED flasher on PFS154: Flashing a LED is certainly among the first set of problems any burgeoning electronics specialist is tackling, may it be by using an ancient NE555 or, more recently, a microcontroller to control the LED. As it turns out, we can turn any trivial problem into a harder one by […]
Category Archives: LEDs
Building a DIY High density Philips Hue LED stripe
Erich created a DIY high density Hue smart LED stripe: Philips Hue Smart LED stripes are great, but they have a disadvantage: the LED density is rather low: one LED cluster (WW, RGB, CW) every 55 mm. This leads to the problem that individual dots might be visible if the LED stripe is directly visible. […]
Lightdriver
Drive WS2812B LED strips from a PMOD device, a lightdriver project @ anfractuosity.com: I created a PMOD module PCB using KiCAD, that enables connecting WS2812B lighting strips to an FPGA board with a PMOD interface. The board was assembled by JLCPCB. This is my first project using an FPGA, I plan to soon implement an […]
Intelligent 7-Segment display
An intelligent 7-Segment display based on Padauk MCU: I elected to use a PADAUK PFS154-S16 as microcontroller for each segment. This device has flash memory and sufficient I/O to control a 7 segment display without multiplexing. The cost is only $0.07, so it is cheaper than, for example, using multiple WS2811 instead. The data input […]
A self-expanding ESP32 PWM board
Eric Gunnerson writes: I’ve been working on a little ESP32 expansion board/shield for an LED project I’ve been working on. One of the nice things about the ESP32 is that it has a peripheral known as “LED control” that provides 16 independent channels of PWM for controlling LED brightness, and my project uses that capability. […]
Programmable seven segment LED tester
A Seven segment LED tester project from Arduino Enigma: Here is the finished Seven Segment Tester. All of the available Arduino Nano pins, except for analog input pins A6,A7 and Serial Port pins D0 and D1 are connected. This leaves us with 18 pins to bring to the 3M Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) socket. Any […]
3 cent PMS150C MCU driving 300 WS2812B LED’s
Driving 300 WS2812B RGB LED’s with “the 3 cent microcontroller” – the Padauk PMS150C. The 3 cent Padauk PMS150C is.. Interesting to say the least. First of all there’s a lot this little MCU doesn’t do. It doesn’t have a lot of code space (1K Word), it doesn’t have a lot of RAM (64 bytes) […]
Control the bicycle traffic signal with a Particle Photon
Glen has been working on a Wi-Fi enabled bicycle traffic signal project: In the first post in this series, we built a miniature LED bicycle traffic signal using 3D printing, laser cutting, a sticker, and an Adafruit Neopixel Jewel. In this post, we’ll look at bringing the signal to life using a Particle Photon. We’ll […]
Edge-lit seven segment display
Debra over at Geek Mom Projects posted detailed instructions of how to build this edge-lit seven segment clocks: This build combines small dozens of small laser-cut acrylic pieces which fit together with very tight tolerances. It uses skinny (4mm wide) LED strips which must be soldered, bent, and then slotted in between those acrylic pieces. When […]
Homebrew DMX-controlled RGB LED light
Glen has written an article detailing his homebrew DMX-controlled RGB LED light: This project is a small DMX-512 controlled, color-changing RGB LED light. The light can be controlled via the DMX512 protocol or it can run a number of built-in programs depending on how the software is configured. The light incorporates an advanced 16-bit PIC24 microcontroller with […]
RTC based automatic LED lamp
Dilshan Jayakody published a new build: This is real-time clock based automatic LED lamp which we originally designed to use as night light. This lamp can programmed to turn on and off at the specific time of the day. For example, it can program to turn on at 6 PM on each day and to […]
Game of Life on a Raspberry Pi (and a LED board) in Haskell
Trandi published a Game of Life on a Raspberry Pi in Haskell project, that is available on Github: This is a quick post about, re-purposing my Raspberry Pi + Peggy2 art installation, which already re-purposes a 8-9 years old Peggy2 LED board, to play Conway’s Game of Life. Trandi’s Peggy2 board has been through several lives […]
Minimalistic 1D pong
Here’s a minimalistic 1D Pong game from Vagrearg: How little do you need for a game An exercise in futility. That is what many would call this endeavor. How few elements (signifiers and affordances) do you need to not only recognize a game for what it is, but also are able to play it? The […]
Lightronome 1 – The light based metronome
Zoltán Gomori documented his lightronome build: I got a request, to design and build an electronic metronome. You can find several on the market, but the problem it is ether producing voice or the classical mechanical metronome. The requirement here was a visual effect. To be precise four LEDs for 4/4 beat. It is required for drumming […]
STM32F103 vs GD32F103 round 2: Blink a LED
A follow-up to the STM32F103 vs GD32F103 round 1- Solderability post, Sjaak writes: The defacto ‘hello world’ for microcontrollers is blink a LED at a steady rate. This is exactly what I’m going to do today. I made a small 5×5 development board, soldered it up and started programming. In this first example we not […]
Multicolor signal light with beeper
Multicolor signal light with beeper for ROS by Gal Pavlin When debugging algorithms in an autonomous vehicle a light that can show algorithm state in real time was proven to be effective for easier debugging and additional insight to what is going on in the code. Because all existing signal light were either to bulky […]
Driving a 48-segment RGB LED bar graph with a Teensy 3.2
Glen Akins writes: In my post Driving a SparkFun 48-Segment RGB LED Bar Graph, I stated that the hardware built there could be used to drive the LED bar graph with any combination of hardware and software that could drive one of the common 32×32 or 32×16 RGB LED matrices. Today I’m back to prove […]
Creating custom 3D printed LED bar graphs
Glen Akins has a nice build log on his 3D printed LED bar graphs: While building my zombie containment unit, I decided I wanted some LED displays or bar graphs to complement the containment status video running on the smaller secondary video monitor. Some other containment units used LED air pressure gauges from eBay. I […]
Programmable LED dimmer
Programmable LED dimmer from Soldernerd: Around one and a half years ago I’ve designed and built various LED dimmers for both white and RGB LEDs. Then late last year someone approached me asking if I could make an RGB dimmer for him, too. But my designs were really tailored to their specific applications and built […]
Individually addressable incandescent lamps
Michael wrote an article on controlling a bunch of lamps individually with WS2811 drivers and Arduino: I simply used the same technology as LED strips to allow communication between lamp modules. LED strips have RGB LEDs with an embedded driver chip which uses PWM (pulse width modulation) to control the duty cycle on the red, […]