Last week we came across these tiny sea urchinshells at a beach shop, thin and light as eggshells. What to do with them? Light them up with LEDs, of course!
Tag Archives: LEDs
Faking it: seven-segment displays
A sordid tale, starting in the bedroom, involving batteries, deceit, cheap tricks, LEDs, and a pot.
Continue reading Faking it: seven-segment displays
Epic menorah is epic.
Joyce and Kaufman sent in this truly fantastic Star Trek Pez LED menorah that they made. Joyce made it last year to hold candles, and this year Kaufman brought it right into the 24th 21st century by mind-melding modding it with one of our Deluxe LED Menorah kits.
Let’s give them both double credit for a fantastic job. Overengineering at its finest, this is.
The Bulbdial Clock Kit
Back in April, we posted a little project in which we demonstrated a simple Bulbdial clock, based on the original concept from IronicSans.com. We had a lot of feedback on the original project. We listened to it, learned from it, and finally designed a kit around the concept.
Peggy 2LE
It’s new… and we shall call it Mini Peggy.
Peggy 2LE (“little edition”) is a diminutive version of our popular Peggy 2 LED “pegboard” an open-source LED matrix display. Peggy 2 is big, designed to fit a 25×25 grid of 10 mm LEDs. Peggy 2LE is mostly the same, just smaller: it’s designed to fit 5 mm LEDs.
Here’s the family photo: Big ol’ Peggy next to the new Mini Peggy, Peggy 2LE.
Continue reading Peggy 2LE
Refining Edge-Lit Holiday Cards
We’ve picked up a bunch of improvements on our Edge-Lit Holiday Cards since last year and we’ve collected them here for you to see. (Also, welcome Popular Science readers! This project is mentioned in the December 2009 issue.)
New LED Hanukkah Menorah Kit
One of our first kit projects, and one of the consistently most popular, has been the LED Mini Menorah project. For a couple years now we have meant to revisit that project, and we’ve finally got around to doing so. Here is the result: our new Deluxe LED Menorah Kit.
Peggy-O-lantern
Lately we have been working on a new version of the PeggyDraw program, which is a program that lets you draw things that you want to display on the Peggy 2 for static images. The new version isn’t quite ready to show off this week, which is too bad because we like to put out our Peggies for halloween.
On the bright side, Mark Delp just sent in a program called bmp2peg that’s been added to the Peggy project at Google Code. It converts a (tiny) windows BMP file and generates an Arduino sketch that can run on the Peggy. (bmp2peg runs on windows, and also on linux if you recompile it, macs unknown thus far.) Both bmp2peg and the original cross-platform PeggyDraw can be used to put static images on the Peggy, or to generate static frames that you swap out in the code to build simple animations. The window-friendly pumpkin above was drawn as an image file, converted with bmp2peg, and installed on a Peggy 2 filled with orange LEDs.
Last year at halloween we took a different approach to the Peggy in the window. We took one filled with red LEDs, and every twenty seconds (or so) it would flash the letters “BOO” — huge and bright — and then go dark again. We took a little movie of this last year, showing how that works.
(The flickr video is embedded below — if you can’t see it, click through to see it.)
The video is very dark, but it’s accurate: our street really is that dark on Halloween. You have to walk slowly because you can’t see where the sidewalk is.
You can find more Halloween decor projects in our Halloween Project Archive.
The Larson Scanner Kit
Today we’re releasing a new open-source project and kit, which is an updated approach to the “Larson Scanner.” The Larson scanner is named in honor of Glen A. Larson, the man responsible for producing both the original Battlestar Galactica and Knight Rider television shows, and consists of a set of red LEDs that scan back and forth.
Three years ago, we showed how to make a Cylon Jack-O-Lantern, in what has become one of our all-time most popular tutorials. The circuit for that project was based on a 555 timer, driving a 4017 decade counter, and has 6 pixels of resolution. To create the incandescent fading effect, we added low-pass transistor drivers. We also wrote up a version of that article for the 2007 Make Magazine Halloween special, which included a slightly nicer version of that same circuit.
And while it’s been popular, we’ve always had some nagging reservations about it, and in particular its battery life. This year, we decided to do something about it and made a much betterversion of the Larson Scanner, and so here it is:
Some thoughts on throwies
We’re big fans of LED throwies and derivative projects where you light an LED simply by connecting it across the terminal of a small lithium coin cell.
You’ll find this trick used in a lot of our projects that call for simply lighting up an LED in a tiny space, like the temporary LED lanterns, LED Ghosties, Robogames awards,
LED origami circuitry, light-up Lego minifigures, and edge-lit holiday cards. You’ll also find them in those little keychain flashlights– open one up and there’s just a battery and an LED.
So the throwie (and I use the term loosely, referring to devices with or without magnets) is a darned useful thing. But the first time that I was introduced to the concept, I asked what a lot of other electronics-oriented people do: “where’s the resistor?”
Turns out that it’s a fair question. LEDs aren’t normally driven directly from a battery. And yet (1) people were making throwies with every imaginable color of LED and (2) they apparently weren’t exploding. So what’s the deal?
