leds
Make Controller + 23,520 LEDs = Bluerain
Bluerain is a zillion blue LED installation based on a desktop computer running a QT app, a Make Controller (of course) and 98 x 16 LED cluster water-proof wall units running awesome TI LED PWM chips (TLC5941). Total number of LED: 23520. Total power: 50W. Levels of brightness: 4096. LED Colors: 1. BLUE. In its […]
Hello Blink!
Everybody seems to be messing with Arduino lately. So today was my chance to give it a go. Jimmie Rodgers of Willoughby and Baltic helped me set up the software on my laptop at Noise Night. It was incredibly easy, and he helped me to understand that the IDE for the ‘regular Arduinos’ is different […]
Running Christmas Lights from Batteries
Don’t want to pack away all those fun colorful Christmas lights? Check out this informative writeup on how to use holiday lights with battery power. It was written primarily for the bulb based lights, but LED strings should work even better than the bulbed ones. Remember that each bulb uses half a watt-hour per hour. […]
Have a green and hackable holiday
Before Christmas this year, there seems to be plenty of neat holiday themed stuff with good parts about to go unsold. Anything with an overt holiday theme will be marked down the day after Christmas, so it is possible to think ahead and provision yourself for some maker fun for the months and years ahead. […]
LED lighting roundup
Greater City: Providence has a post on some recent LED lighting news (good stuff+links in the blog and the comments), including links to a couple of articles on LED streetlights in NYC, Ann Arbor, and others: Since LEDs use less power than existing halogen, incandescent, or even fluorescent bulbs, it makes sense that this will […]
LED Ghosties
Like LED Throwies but more for halloween, these guys haunted the Evil Mad Science table at Maker Faire Austin: Learn how to build one of these netherworldly light emitters here!