Category Archives: LEDs

DIY 3W constant current LED driver

Dilshan Jayakody wrote a post on his blog about his 3W constant current LED driver: This is quick post about 3W constant current LED driver which I was design to combine with some homemade furniture piece. The main components of this system is LM311 voltage comparator and IRF9640 P-Channel MOSFET. This module is design to drive maximum of […]

Making a mini LED Christmas tree

Raj just finished his mini LED Christmas tree project: My two and a half year old son loves toys with flashing lights. For this Christmas I thought of making a mini LED Christmas tree for him. This project uses 22 multi-color LEDs which are driven by a PIC12F683 microcontroller using the Charlieplexing technique. The details […]

Light up your XMAS from your Smartphone

Boris of Open Electronics writes: This post is about a light animation game that can light up your Christmas. There’s Bluetooth, Android and audio files: a perfect festive mashup. A spectrum analyzer will help us color the winter festivities. Every year at Christmas we always want to try something new for lighting up our decorations: […]

Constant current circuit for IR LEDs

The crew from AnalysIR reports they have written up an article on constant current circuit for Infrared LEDs – similar to that in the USB IR Toy. They compare the various methods of driving IR LEDs, including a series resistor and a circuit driven by an NPN transistor, and how to design your circuit for […]

UberCubeX4- The MSP430 based benchtop LED cube

In this video Rohit Gupta demonstrates his 4x4x4 LED Cube using MSP430G2553 microcontroller: I recently made a led cube. It is a project i was dreaming to fiddle with for quite a while(years). I finally managed to make one. Here is the complete video of the demonstration.Its basically a 4x4x4 Led Cube with various patterns programmed into it. […]

Proverbial LED blink program for chipKit DP32

Ras B blogged about his chipKIT DP 32  he won in our last week chipKIt  giveaway: Ok I just could not resist, and had to post the Proverbial Led blink Program adapted for the DP32, that has 4 LED’s on the board ( Digital Pins 11 to 14). Will scroll them from right to left, speed varying on the […]

LED cube spectrum analyzer project

John Boxall over at Tronixstuff posted a step by step guide on building a LED cube spectrum analyzer: A few weeks ago I was asked about creating a musical-effect display with an RGB LED cube kit from our friends over at Freetronics, and with a little work this was certainly possible using the MSGEQ7 spectrum analyzer IC. In […]

Propeller Halloween pumpkin project

This project uses a Parallax Propeller Project board with microSD card attached, PIR sensor, LM386 Audio Amp, IRL520 FET and associated discrete components to make an animated Halloween prop. The PIR inside the pumpkin senses motion and when triggered it plays a WAV file from a microSD Card while flashing an internal light, causing an […]

Dynamo powered LED bicycle taillight

Martin uses a dynamo to power his bicycle taillight and wanted to find a way for it to remain lit when the bicycle was not in motion. He sent in this quick hack he used, adding a supercap in the taillight circuit, which powers the light without the need for batteries. Via the contact form.

Simple Propeller GPS status display

If you’ve ever wanted to know how many GPS satellites are receivable at your location here’s a good beginneer’s Propller project that provides the answer. Its a GPS status display project Nick Ernst developed written in SPIN code and using a Propeller Mini Board, VPN11513 GPS Receiver, shift register and 7-Segment LED display. “The Propeller […]

High-voltage seven segment LED display driver with SPI interface

Raj writes: This is about my new project, which is a High-Voltage Seven Segment LED Driver with a serial interface. The goal is to simplify the interface of bigger seven segment display modules to 5V microcontrollers. The project provides a TTL SPI interface of MAX7219 to input display data from a 5V microcontroller and outputs […]

Light up logic symbols – Or RS-FlipFlops the weird way

NsN writes: At the OHM 2013 Festival, I got inspired to make some logic gates that work with light. The basic idea is to have a simple and cheap gadget, that can become an AND/OR/XOR… gate. You could then connect multiple of these gates via fiber optics to make more complex circuits. Via the forum.

Open source Halloween LED projects

Eric Thompson of Lowvoltagelabs. sends in these two Open Source Hardware projects for Halloween: I thought October might be a good time to share a couple Halloween related circuit boards that I have designed. Both of them were designed using KiCAD and I have released them as open source hardware so people can make their […]

Mobile phone/Arduino Bluetooth interface

Kerimil has created another app for interfacing mobile phones and microcontrollers through Bluetooth. This time it’s a simple phone controlled RGB LED. The Arduino sketch/code can be found in his Arduino Forum post. The Android .apk file can be downloaded from Google docs, as well as a zip file containing the Android source. Via the […]

Arduino-controlled RGB LED infinity mirror

Ben Finio wrote this Instructable detailing his RGB LED Infinity Mirror: It’s an RGB LED infinity mirror that lets you toggle between an adjustable-speed color-fade mode and a direct-control mode where you individually set the red, green, and blue LED brightness levels. The primary inspiration for this particular project comes from this infinity mirror Instructable and Adafruit’s […]

I2C LED Display from Hacked Voltmeter

Tom writes: I turned up this cool project write up that reprogrammed a cheap LED voltmeter for use as a general purpose 7 segment display with I2C communication. These voltmeters cost about $3 instead of $10 for an equivalent LED display backpack from Adafruit. NB the author used a Bus Pirate to troubleshoot the bitbanged […]