Category Archives: LEDs

The LiveLight Project: open source ambilight solution

Juha Kuusama writes to inform us of LiveLight, a cool DIY ambilight project. This is a homebrew ambilight system by SunWind that has 9 PWM controlled RGB channels which drive RGB LED strips that are mounted in the back of a 40″ Sony Bravia. All the parameters can be reprogrammed to match your taste. The […]

MacLight: ambient Arduino lighting for the Mac

Adam Howard of 3 Sided Cube has developed the MacLight project. It works to vary the color of LEDs mounted behind your Mac to the average color of your monitor. It can also manually set the lighting via an RGB color selector. Adam says: Most projects I start are because it’s something that I want […]

PixelInvaders: LED matrix panel

Michu built a LED matrix panel that is controlled by his PixelController software we blogged about. The panel consists of 64 individual RGB modules. The modules have three RGB LEDs on them controlled with a LPD6803 serial shift register LED driver. The color range is 15bit deep, or 5bit per basic color. By connecting them […]

Colornode holiday lighting microcontroller board

ColorNode is a wireless Arduino-compatible microcontroller board designed to replace the stock controller board on GE Color Effects light strings. It’s a project designed by digitalmisery and was inspired by deep darc’s Hacking Christmas Lights project last year. The schematic and photos are available, and they promise to post the code as soon as the […]

80M direct conversion receiver update

Jason continued to develop his 7400 contest entry the 80M direct conversion receiver, here is an update: Finally, I addressed the lack of knowledge of what frequency is being tuned by adding a frequency counter. It is based on the XC9572XL breakout board from Ian and company. Coding the counter was a good learning experience […]

Driving a bicolor LED from a single output pin

This blog demonstrates how to drive a bi-color LED, or any 2 LEDs, by using only one microcontroller pin. Sinking or sourcing current from the LED selects which one will light up. Setting the pin as input turns both LEDs off. Alternating between 0,1, and high-Z, both LEDs are fully controllable and even dimmable. The […]

DIY Arduino Ambilight using ShiftBrites

Don built an Amblight for his home theater PC. He put together this tutorial describing his build of a multichannel Arduino-based Ambilight. He estimates the BOM at $40 (in addition to the Arduino). The bill of materials include 6+ ShiftBrites (your call, I wouldn’t do less than 6 though), a printed circuit board, wire, and […]

Controllable aquarium moonlight strip

Theatrus build a controllable aquarium moonlight strip on the fish tank bubbler. Royal-blue Osram high power surface mount LEDs provide the lighting, and an ATmega88 the control. RS485 port is used for control. All of the design files should be available shortly. Its quite potent (visible with the main 6x80W T5s running). Its easy to mount […]

Lightpack – USB content-driving ambient lighting system

Atarity writes to inform us of a project being developed in Russia known as the Lightpack 5.5, with an English language wiki page available. The software analyzes the image on your monitor and transfers its data by USB to the Lightpack board. This board lights the surface behind a monitor, TV or laptop by means […]

Build an LED display board that Tweets

Robert Diamond is with Alpha One Labs in Brooklyn. When they acquired a discarded LED sign sans control circuitry that they wanted to repurpose, they knew their work was cut out for them. He writes: After hooking it up and enabling it to display incoming tweets, a prototype was born. In this guide, I’ll walk […]

3 wire DLG2416 CPLD display controller

Alan posted this project at FromOrbit demonstrating how to implement three wire control of a DLG2416 display using a CPLD. The chip he chose was the Xilinx XC9536 which is the 36 macrocell version of the XC9572 CPLD found in our CPLD Development Board, so this can be implemented on our board with room to […]

Light painting using an Arduino-based PegBoard

Wulfrano Moreno is a photography enthusiast who heard about light painting photography using an iPad. Not having an iPad, he learned of the Peggy2 Board from Evil Mad Science and decided to give it a try to producing light painting effects. After building the Peggy board, he used PeggyDraw2 to transfer an image from the […]

ATmega168A pulse width modulation (PWM)

ProtoStack shows how to dim a LED using pulse width modulation and an ATmega168A: Dimming an incandescent bulb is easy. Simply adjust the current down using a potentiometer and you are done. Dimming an LED is another story entirely. When you reduce current through an LED there are unintended consequences like color shifts and dropouts. […]

App note: very low-cost sensing and communication using bidirectional LEDs

Squonk writes Here is an interesting paper on “Very Low-Cost Sensing and Communication Using Bidirectional LEDs”. Not new (2003), but this technical report is very detailed. The abstract to the document by Mitsubishi Electric states: “A novel microprocessor interface circuit is described which can alternately emit and detect light using only an LED, two digital […]