Category Archives: blinkenlights

This Blinken Grid Is All Analog

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The personal computers of today are economical with their employ of the humble LED. A modern laptop might have a power LED, and a hard drive indicator if you’re lucky. It was the mainframes of the ’60s and ’70s that adhered to the holy Doctrine of Blinken, flickering lamps with abandon to indicate machine activity to the skilled operators of yore. [Matseng] wanted to recreate this aesthetic, and went about it in an entirely analog fashion.

The project is built around an 8×8 LED grid, that was soldered up using a 3D printed jig for dimensional accuracy. Fitted to each …read more

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Tech Tattoos Trace Two Dimensions

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Flexible circuit boards bend as you might expect from a playing card, while skin stretches more like knit fabric. The rules for making circuit boards and temporary tattoos therefore need to be different. Not just temporary tattoos, there are also circuits that reside on the skin so no unregulated heat traces, please. In addition to flexing and stretching, these tattoos can be applied to uneven surfaces and remain intact. Circuits could be added to the outside of projects or use the structure as the board to reduce weight and size. Both are possible with the research from Carnegie Mellon’s Soft …read more

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Lessons in Disposable Design from a Cheap Blinky Ball

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Planned obsolescence, as annoying as it is when you’re its victim, still has to be admired. You can’t help but stand in awe of the designer who somehow managed to optimize a product to live one day longer than its warranty period. Seriously, why is it always the next day?

The design of products that are never intended to live long enough to go obsolete must be similarly challenging, and [electronupdate] did a teardown of a cheap LED blinky toy to see what’s involved. You’ve no doubt seen these seizure-triggering silicone balls before, mostly at checkout counters and the like …read more

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Minimal Blinky Project Makes The Chip The Circuit Board

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We’ve got a thing for projects that have no real practical value but instead seek to answer a simple yet fundamental question: I wonder if I can do that? This dead-bug style 555 blinky light is one of those projects, undertaken just to see how small a circuit can be. Pretty small, as it turns out, and we bet it can get even smaller.

[Danko]’s minimal circuit is about as small as possible for the DIP version of the venerable 555 chip. The BOM is stripped to the bone: just the chip, three resistors, a capacitor, and an LED. All …read more

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A Hacker’s Epic Quest to Keep His Son Entertained

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Little humans have a knack for throwing a wrench in the priorities of their parents. As anyone who’s ever had children will tell you, there’s nothing you wouldn’t do for them. If you ever needed evidence to this effect, just take a gander at the nearly year-long saga that chronicles the construction of an activity board [Michael Teeuw] built for his son, Enzo.

Whether you start at the beginning or skip to the end to see the final product, the documentation [Michael] has done for this project is really something to behold. From the early days of the project where …read more

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Everyone Needs A Personal Supercomputer

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When you think of supercomputers, visions of big boxes and blinkenlights filling server rooms immediately appear. Since the 90s or thereabouts, these supercomputers have been clusters of computers, all working together on a single problem. For the last twenty years, people have been building their own ‘supercomputers’ in their homes, and now we have cheap ARM single board computers to play with. What does this mean? Personal supercomputers. That’s what [Jason] is building for his entry to the Hackaday Prize.

The goal of [Jason]’s project isn’t to break into the Top 500, and it’s doubtful it’ll be more powerful than …read more

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Joule Thief Steals in Favor of Christmas

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A lot of things tend to get stretched during the holiday season, like shopping budgets and waistbands and patience. This year, [Chris] is stretching the limits of both the mini breadboard and the humble 1.5 V LR44 coin cell with his joule thief-driven LED mini Christmas tree.

With the push of a micro momentary, the joule thief circuit squeezes enough power from an LR44 to boot an MSP430 microcontroller, which needs 1.8 V – 3.6 V. After boot, the micro takes control of the joule thief circuit and milks it whenever the voltage falls below 3.2 V. This tree may …read more

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The Altair Shield

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From PDPs to Connection Machines, the Hackaday crowd are big fans of blinkenlights. While this project isn’t an old CPU, RAM, ROM, and an S-100 bus wrapped up in a fancy enclosure, it is a great recreation of the Altair 8800, the historic kit computer that supposedly launched the microcomputer revolution.

[Justin] says his project is just another Altair 8800 clone, but this one is cut down to the size of an Arduino shield. This is in stark contrast to other Altair recreations, whether they are modern PCs stuffed in an old case, modern replicas, or a board that has …read more

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Horten Fyr is Norwegian for Blinkie

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Our Norwegian is pretty weak, so we struggled a little bit with the documentation for a big public LED art project in the lighthouse (translated) in Horten, Norway. But we do speak the universal language of blinkies, and this project has got them: 3,008 WS2812b LEDs ring the windows at the top of the lighthouse and create reactive patterns depending on the wave height and proximity of the ferry that docks there.

This seems to be an evolving project, with more features being added slowly over time. We love the idea of searching for the WiFi access point on the …read more

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Horten Fyr is Norwegian for Blinkie

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Our Norwegian is pretty weak, so we struggled a little bit with the documentation for a big public LED art project in the lighthouse (translated) in Horten, Norway. But we do speak the universal language of blinkies, and this project has got them: 3,008 WS2812b LEDs ring the windows at the top of the lighthouse and create reactive patterns depending on the wave height and proximity of the ferry that docks there.

This seems to be an evolving project, with more features being added slowly over time. We love the idea of searching for the WiFi access point on the …read more

Continue reading Horten Fyr is Norwegian for Blinkie→