The influence of the Slow Food movement is increasing, and gardening is getting ever more popular. Even the tech bloggers are posting about local pollinators and getting beehives. In this environment, it is fitting that a new use has been found for our Now Slower and with More Bugs stickers, which were first seen in the wild back in December 2007. If you find a good use for them, we’d love to see pictures in the flickr auxiliary!
(Thanks, Lorien!)
Photos by Lorien Tersey
We filled up a Peggy 2 with 2×2 super-pixels consisting of red, green, blue, and white 10 mm LEDs. This makes an easy and big programmable full-color LED matrix.
Peggy fits 25×25 LEDs, so if you fill every hole this way, you wind up with a 12.5 x 12.5 pixel RGBW matrix.
And like whoa— you can animate it.
Yup, there’s video. The video is embedded below, and you can also view it directly at YouTube. (In either case, please excuse the scanline artifacts produced by our camera.)
One thing worth noting (and that we demo in the video) is that you can diffuse the big RGBW pixels into one continuous full-color display by placing a thin diffusing plastic layer above the LEDs– it really works well.
The demo code is an Arduino sketch, based on Jay Clegg’s timer-interrupt style grayscale driver for Peggy (demonstrated here), you can download it here (12 kB Arduino .pde sketch file). Besides the colorful flow shown in the pictures, this code also has a mode to light just the red, green, blue or white LEDs at a time.
Here’s a simple fabric sleeve you can make to protect your phone from keys, coins, cables, and whatever else gets thrown in the bag with it. Even simpler, you can make it without sewing at all through the magic of iron-on adhesives. Best of all, you can still see who’s calling and answer calls through the fabric.
Here are seventeen of our favorite magnet tricks, projects and demos.
Extract batteries from stubborn holders
We’ve all got things that take batteries. Some of them are well designed, and some of them are not. The worst offenders are electronic toys that take (say) half a dozen AA batteries, all of which must be inserted with the correct orientation– spring side first– and pried out, well, somehow. Rather than risk puncturing your batteries by prying them out with something pointy, just use a magnet to lift them out.
Continue reading 17 cool magnet tricks
Forget poodles–defend your cities!!!
Here’s how to make your own post-modern 8-bit retro poodleless circle skirt.
Continue reading Missile Command Circle Skirt
Neat! Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories cats Harley (left) and JellyBean (right) are making a guest appearance on I Can Has Cheezburger? today.
[These two– the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories Feline Auxiliary— seem to show up in a lot of our projects. Like here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.]
Last year David Friedman published on his blog Ironic Sans an interesting design concept for something that he called The Bulbdial Clock.
That’s like a sundial, but with better resolution– not just an hour hand, but a minute and second hand as well, each given as a shadow from moving artificial light sources (bulbs).
We’ve recently put together a working bulbdial clock, with an implementation somewhat different from that of the original concept.
Rather than using three physically moving light sources at different heights, we use three rings of LEDs at different heights. Within each ring, we only turn on one LED at a time, so that we only have a single effective light source– it can light up at different places from within the ring. The three rings are located above one another so that they each project light onto the rod in the middle, making shadows of different lengths.
Additionally, for fun and clarity, we used red, green, and blue LEDs for the three rings, making each shadow hand of the clock a different color. Each ring has 12 LEDs, and the 36 LEDs are efficiently multiplexed by an AVR microcontroller that also handles the timekeeping part of the project. Continue reading A Bulbdial Clock
The inspiration for this week’s project comes from the Japanese stacking octagonal box kit shown above. We previously used a similar technique to demonstrate a business card box with traditional elegance. We now present a surreal modern makeover for Japanese papercraft boxes by using (recycling) paperboard packaging.
We follow the same basic construction techniques, but simplify it by eliminating the paper coverings and decorations. In their place, we use paperboard from cereal, cracker and cookie packaging. These cheerful boxes are easier and less expensive to make and have a surreal quality to them.
They are great for storage, gift giving, and decorative use. We’re currently storing safety pins, jewel beads and googly eyes (not edible ones) in them.
The abstraction created from taking the package out of its context can be wonderfully fun. Multiple packages can be used together to create a wild collage of modern advertising with different shapes, colors and fonts. The pfeffernusse box on its own looked like it belonged in December, but combined with the box of pita chips it took on a completely different character.
Photo by Bill Bumgarner (some rights reserved)
Taking pictures of LEDs can be difficult. Digital camera sensors just don’t respond the same way that human eyes do, so it is nearly impossible to take a picture that reflects what you are seeing. But manipulating a few settings like white balance and shutter speed can improve things immensely, as can simple physical things like using a tripod.
In the lovely photo above, two LED displays are propped up on a reflective stone countertop. The vivid colors we want to see show up in the reflection, and the LEDs facing us head-on illustrate how washed-out they can look as the camera sensor gets saturated.
