LEDs – Page 7 – Dangerous Prototypes

Simple LED tester/matcher

Here’s a simple adjustable current source with a PNP transistor that drives either one or two LEDs for testing and/or intensity matching purposes. The current is from 2 to 16 mA in four steps using a rotary switch. While this would make a good beginner’s project, its also a useful gadget for hobbyists of all […]

RGB pixel clock

Tobias Floery built this RGB pixel clock and wrote a detailed explanation describing the build. These RGB Pixels look like they are fun to work with since they are so versatile. Tobias Floery is having some fun building an RGB Pixel Clock using a string of them. You can see the 3 parts of the […]

New version of MAX7219 based 4-digit serial seven segment LED display

Embedded Lab’s new version of MAX7219 based 4-digit serial seven segment LED display: This (SPI7SEGDISP4.40-1R) is a revised version of the previous SPI seven segment LED display (4 digit) board that displayed numerals and decimal points. The new version has a better quality seven segment LED display (LTC-4727JS) with three extra LED segments, as shown […]

Macroblock MBI5030 starter board

Macroblock MBI5030, is a 16 channel constant current LED driver with PWM output, and a SPI-like interface, it requires external grayscale clock though. The problem: you need the chip to figure out if your code actually works. And you also need the LEDs to see what’s going on – if at all. You could use […]

Digital reversi board project

Digital reversi board by Hanting Lu and Kai Wang from Cornell University, built as a final project: For our final project in ECE 4760, we designed and implemented a Reversi board consisting of hardware, a microcontroller, and a touch screen. Sixty-four bicolor (red and green) LEDs were implemented as the black and white pieces of […]

Geek love: Valentine’s Day robot

Clint Stevenson and his son built this animatronic robot head for his Valentine’s Day treat box for school and wrote up the build on the Casco Logix blog. He relates, “The blog post doesn’t talk about or show the body of the robot, just the head. But my son and I are pretty excited for […]

High efficiency battery boost regulator using the MCP1640

Giorgos over at PCBheaven made a MCP1640 boost converter for his camping LED light project. It’s designed to squeeze every last bit of energy from the batteries. What i want now, is something to spice up this hack. So here is what – I used the MCP1640 boost converter to drain the last electron from […]

Controlling a high power RGB LED with Raspberry Pi

Thomas Sarlandie writes, “I have hooked up a high power LED driver that I designed and built a few months ago to a 40W led and to a Raspberry Pi. I had to fight the Pi a little to get clean PWMs out of it (without using an Arduino or external PWM generator) and the […]

PIXEL interactive LED art mirror

Here’s an interesting art piece for your living room. It’s a Bluetooth controlled 32×32 LED matrix mounted in a picture frame. It’s designed to display pixel art uploaded from your android device. The LED matrix is controlled via an Android device through the IOIOMint board. PIXEL is open source – both the hardware and software. […]

24×30 RGB LED matrix

Madox is designing a RGB LED matrix consisting of 30 addressable RGB LED strips with 24 LEDs each. The LEDs are controlled through the Teensy 3.0 Arduino board over an I2C interface. The project is a LED lamp that will be mounted on the wall. It comprises of 24 LED Strips of 30 LEDs each […]

8 digit 7 segment display with SPI interface

Raj designed this 8 digit 7 segment display with an SPI interface using a MAX7219 display driver: The SPI7SEGDISP8.56 module can be interfaced with any microcontroller that has 3 I/O pins available. If the microcontroller features a built-in hardware SPI, then the display module can be interfaced as a SPI slave device. In that case […]

LED sign control board replaced with Arduino

Bob picked up a huge LED matrix sign on eBay that has power supply problems. After fixing the power supply, he decided to replace the controler boards with an Arduino. Via Hacked Gadgets.

Christmas Tree O’Digital Logic

Chris from PyroElectro writes about his holiday project. “It’s an all-digital-hardware LED Christmas tree we’re calling the Christmas Tree O’Digital Logic. The tree itself is composed of 64 LEDs built into a spiral sitting on a piece of protoboard. Underneath, the controller uses shift registers and a 555 timer to create two modes of display: […]

Led matrix with HT1632C controller

Luca wrote a tutorial about LED matrices with HT1632C controller.

Water LED Art: Making LEDs light up with water

Christopher Woodall from HappyRobotLabs shared this Water LED Art: Making LEDs Light Up With Water: I wrote up a little explanation because the BUILDS hackerspace at BU wants to recreate the wall for an exhibit and maybe make a water based input system. Mostly we just found it cool an inspiring. Via the contact form.

How-to: build an 8×8 LED cube kit

Chris from PyroElectro presents this post explaining the process for building an 8x8x8 LED cube (that’s 512 LEDs) from a kit. This is essentially Chris’ review of the Jameco 8×8 LED Cube Kit. He explains both how to build the LED cube and how to make the electronics that control it. Visit PyroElectro for more […]

Training module: Austria Microsystems AS1130 LED driver chip

Digi-Key has a training module on using the Austria Microsystems AS1130 LED Driver chip. The AS1130 can drive 132 LEDs with one chip via the “Crossplexing” technique similar to Charlieplexing. The AS1130 features include a built-in scrolling function. The 38 page PDF datasheet is available here. Drone via the contact form.

How LEDs are made

Ever wondered what goes into the process of making LED goodness? Here’s a how-to video from OSRAM on the basics of LED manufacturing. Via Adafruit.

The LED turns 50!

This month the venerable LED turns 50! The LED started life in October 1962 in a General Electric research lab in New York state and has progressed from the good ‘ol standby red to a multitude of colors today. You can view a short video by the LED’s inventor chronicling the device’s history on the […]