NYC Resistor

Adam and I upgraded Hexascroller to control 5 m of Adafruit RGB LED strip through a spare serial port connected to a Teensy 2.0 that drives the strip via SPI. Now when a new message is displayed, the accent lights switch to a bright flashing mode to attract attention, then they will return to soothing, slow color changing mode.

Click the “Read more” to see additional photos of the installation and setup. Read more

The inPulse watch is a great platform to hack on. It has an ARM7, 32 KB of flash and 8 KB of RAM, Bluetooth, a buzzer, an OLED screen and a button. Not much by today’s standards, but plenty to play around with. The programming environment is very much like a microcontroller; no multitasking, no dynamic memory, and very constrained memory/cpu. That is, of course, what makes it so much fun.
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Our new space is pretty amazing, but there was one thing we still needed. We are on the 4th floor of our building, and the stairs were a little hard for first time visitors to find. We had a temporary remedy:

but obviously this would not do as a permanent installation, especially with our big event on Saturday!

So here is the new sign.

Thanks to Ryan for help with the circuit design, and thanks to Adam for the Arduino code (yes the Arduino is overkill but we decided it was appropriate considering the theme of the art show!). Let me tell you, this sign was fun to make!

Adam wrote the Arduino code in about 2 minutes, and here it is:
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Two fun things are happening this Sunday: A cheap and cheerful blinky workshop for Arduino users and a fun and crafty class in making glowing LED jewelery. Come on by!

Ever wanted to grow grass in your cubicle? I did. But the grass kept dying. So I made a custom grow light out of LEDs, and now I have the nicest lawn on my block. Build photos, schematic, sourcecode, etc. are on the project page.

Canuck Hackers Hacking Aboot

You may remember Canadia as the red terror of the north. Whose imperialistic aspirations once lead them to invade the United States without any evidence or accusation of wrong doing. But today, I’m going to write not about the unbridled threat to our freedoms that these loyalists bring to the table… but about the awesome hack space that’s starting to really get rolling in Toronto. hacklab.to is housed in the kensington area of toronto above a bar. Seth Hardy and Leigh Honeywell have been working tirelessly for months to see this place get off the ground and from the looks of it they are very nearly close to success. I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing more from these guys. Especially if they start stock piling on siege weapons and molson ice for an impending invasion of the colonies.

Read more about them at their site: http://hacklab.to/

Last night as we were preparing for the party, Eric broke out his camera and took this cool video of my LED Cylinder project. Thanks Eric!

More details on the project, including schematics and sourcecode, are available at http://dclausen.net/projects/ledcyl/.

If you want to learn how to make projects like this, check out our classes! We have several electronics and LED classes coming up, including Introduction to LEDs next weekend and Building LED Displays the weekend after that. Also you should come to our Party / Art of the Game Gallery Show tonight (Saturday, July 26, 2008) to see this project and a bunch of other cool things on display.

I’m making a really tiny board and I thought I’d share a picture of it. It’s a little tiny data gathering widget with an RGB LED on it for feedback. There’s an AVR there too. It’s 1.25″ square. I think it looks nifty!q

Play or Die

So here’s a quick preview of the LED Array Jacket. I’m pretty excited it’s managed to light. Currently I am redesigning the driver circuit and boarduino to work with non-solid core wiring and to be more elegant and clean. But I thought this might wet your appetites.

My good friend Chris McDonald made this extra-great, 2-axis drawing machine for doing time-lapse photography.

Here’s the info from his personal website vanita phone company: 

Gertrude uses two stepper motors to move an LED in a very high resolution x/y plane. The movement of the LED is photographed using exposures usually between 30 and 90 seconds. Gertrude can either be programmed to “print” a design automatically (“Christopher & Daniil”, the Hell Yup!: Scanlines shots) or controlled live via a joystick (Open&Close portrait series). 

II: Christopher & Daniil not talking (pt. 2 in a series of 2) 

Hell Yup!: Scanlines 3 (Self-Portrait)