zondag 16 juni 2013

Lightboxes

A friend of mine had the idea to make ordinary lightbulbs react to music, for a large event he was organizing. We put our heads together and a month later we ended up with these.

In each box there is an atmega328 microcontroller, an msgeq7 "spectrum analyzing" IC, two shift registers, two transistor arrays, and five strands of rgb led strip. The spectrum analyzing IC allows the boxes to react to 7 different frequenty bands, but only the lowest two (63hz and 160hz) proved to be visually interesting.

The music we tested them with on the video was most obnoxiously dynamic music we could find. Might not suit a lot of ears, but it suited the lights. We still have to make a better video though.






Longboard

I really wanted to have a longboard with led lighting. So I built one!







Bal

A bit of a random project. I found a nice big glass ball at a thrift shop, and obviously had to put some leds in it. The plan however was to be able to project some sort of vague images in the orb, but the angle of the leds was too wide, so almost everything merged together. This made the led ball more interesting without the glass ball than with, so I set the glass ball aside for another project. As with the previous project, I designed the plastic parts in sketchup, and printed them with my reprap. I am thinking if switching to solidworks though. 






Stairs

The new house I moved to had a pretty dark hallway, so I made automatic stair lighting to avoid falling down the stairs every now and then. I used an atmega328 microcontroller, a bunch of wide angle leds, and two ultrasonic distance sensors. I modelled the plastic parts in sketchup, and printed them with my reprap.






Snake

My first led project! I used an arduino, 256 warm white leds, and four "TLC5940" ICs. It had 4 modes: All on (in 256 brightness levels), the game snake, the game pong, and a graphic equalizer (for music). 

The ICs however ended up causing some "glitching" (random flickering) in the leds. I tried everything I could think of, or find on google, to stop these glitches, but nothing seemed to work. I abandoned the project (and the ICs for that matter), and it has since been serving as a nice ceiling light.