From the MAKE Flickr photo pool
Micah’s Lego Sky project incorporates an Ikea LED light strip and touchpad control –
The Altoids tin has the modified driver circuit: It’s the original circuit board with the microcontroller removed, then a homemade Arduino clone to control it. The orange box is an old Cirque PS/2 touchpad, removed from its original case and covered in fabric.
The Arduino sketch (firmware) is a little C++ program that reads the touchpad and uses it to control Hue and Lightness in the HSL color space. The result is a pretty intuitive and unobtrusive control which makes it easy to both pick a color and desaturate it toward white or dim it toward black. You can easily get some really nice sunset and sky colors.
Get more details on his blog – Lego Sky
More:
DIY Screen glow
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