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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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.
Michu shared his IKEA Expedit shelf RGB LED mod ExpeditInvaders. He connected 40 RGB LED modules and a keyboard to an Arduino to make a color changing Ikea bookcase: I just finished my project “ExpeditInvaders”, a spiced up Ikea shelf! … Read more
Raj entered his Animated LED Christmas sign into the Open 7400 Logic Competition. Having already build a PIC controlled version, he wanted to try and control the sign using discrete logic only. The individual letters are build from red LEDs … Read more
Every Wednesday we highlight a component from the updated partlist. This week: LEDs. Surface mount LEDs feel a bit smaller than capacitors and resistors in the same package. Despite moving to 0603 C and Rs, we still use 0805 LEDs. … Read more
An app note on a LED brightness controller: In this circuit, a digital potentiometer (DS1869) aids an LED-driver IC (MAX16800) in providing manual control of the LED brightness. The circuit also provides thermal protection against excessive heat and overload conditions. Thanks … Read more
rsdio writes: Although this circuit does not directly show how, you can use the same idea to make a 3.3 V tolerant I/O pin control an LED with a much higher voltage. The caveat is that all of the current … Read more
A remote-controlled lightning applications: One benefit LEDs offer in general lighting applications is that they are easier to control remotely. This application note describes a remote-controlled architectural or street-lighting system and describes how to implement power-line or wireless communications control … Read more
Andrejk uses an individually-controllable Christmas lights to indicate the presence of someone on his IM contact list. Via Hack a Day.
Deep Darc has successfully reverse engineered the operation of a 50-light set of GE multicolor Christmas lights. His work involved snooping the protocol used on the LEDs data bus line and exploration of the remote control unit, resulting in source … Read more
John Park at Make has a really nice introduction to 7-segment LED displays and reverse engineering. He maps the relationship between bits in a byte and each LED segment connected to an SAA106 driver. This is a real-world introduction to … Read more
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few professionally-made PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. … Read more
will_j posted a Bus Pirate script that controls a Sure Electronics 8×32 LED marquee: Here’s a quick and dirty perl script to display ‘BPv3′ on a Sure Electronics 8×32 LEd Matrix display. You can also use a 16×24 display if … Read more
This is an old version, see the latest version on the documentation wiki. You may have come across this 16×24 LED matrix board on eBay or at Sure Electronics. Each board has three 8×8 LED blocks and a controller to … Read more
We go through a lot of prototype PCBs, and end up with lots of extras that we’ll never use. Every Sunday we give away a few professionally-made PCBs from one of our past or future projects, or a related prototype. … Read more
Nuxx.net writes: Today I finally got to poking around with the Hack A Day Bus Pirate v2.go … the LEDs on it are far, far, far brighter than they need to be. At my normally-lit desk in a normally-lit office, … Read more
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