Collaborate Disseminate
[Chris Combs] recently took the wraps off of an incredible art piece that he calls Road Ahead which uses 336 seven segment LED digits to create an absolutely gorgeous display. With a piece of smoked acrylic to slightly diffuse the orange glow of the LEDs, the end result has a …read more
Continue reading Bask In The Glory Of This 336 LED Digit Display
Providing a display for a project in 2020 is something of a done deal. Standard interfaces and off-the-shelf libraries for easily available and cheap modules mean that the hardest choice you’ll have to make about a display will probably relate to its colour. Three decades ago though this was not …read more
Over the years, the media has managed to throw together some pretty ridiculous visual depictions of computer hacking. But perhaps none have gone as far down the road of obfuscation as The Matrix, where the most experienced hackers are able to extract information from a display of cascading green …read more
Continue reading Movie-Style Hacking With a Wall of Glowing Hex
We’ve recently noticed an uptick of interest in so-called “bubble displays”: vintage alphanumeric LEDs which are probably best remembered as being used in watches and calculators before the LCD took over. Today they’re available as surplus or even salvage for literally pennies, but unfortunately they only provide four or five …read more
Continue reading Chaining Together A 16×2 Bubble LED Display
Microcontrollers are a great way to learn about developing for embedded systems. However, once you outgrow their capabilities, FPGAs bring muscle that’s hard for even the fastest-clocked micros to match. If you’re doing anything with high-speed signals, loads of RAM, or something that requires lots of parallel calculation, you can’t …read more
Continue reading LED Driver Board Could Be Your Ticket To FPGA Development
The archetypal “blink an LED” is a great starter project on any platform, but once the bug takes hold that quickly turns into an exploration of exactly how many LEDs a given microcontroller can drive. And that often leads to Charlieplexing. A quick search yields many copies of The Table …read more
Continue reading Visualizing LEDs for More Efficient Pin Packing
We live in an era in which all manner of displays are cheap and readily available. A few dollars spent online can net you a two-line alphanumeric LCD, a graphical OLED screen, or all manner of other options. Years ago however, people made do with little monolithic LED devices. [sjm4306] …read more
In the practical world we live in, PCBs are often rectangles (or rectangles with rectangles, it’s just rectangles all the way down). When a designer goes to schematic capture things are put down on nice neat grid intersections; and if there isn’t a particular demand during layout the components probably …read more
[Paul Gallagher] has spent years separating his tasks into carefully measured out blocks, a method of time management known as the Pomodoro Technique. If that’s not enough proof that he’s considerably more organized and structured than the average hacker, you only need to take a look at this gorgeous Pomodoro Timer he’s entered into the Circuit Sculpture Contest. Just don’t be surprised if you suddenly feel like your own time management skills aren’t cutting it.
While [Paul] has traditionally just kept mental note of the hour-long blocks of time be breaks his work into, he thought it was about time …read more
Continue reading A Perfectly Orderly Way to Manage Your Time
When you’re debugging a board which has an ESP32, Raspberry Pi, or Arduino, it’s easy to slap on a small LCD display or connect via WiFi to see what’s wrong. At least, that’s what the kids are doing. But what if you’re old-school or you don’t have one of those pimped-out, steroid-filled boards? A resistor and an LED will often suffice. Powering the LED means one thing and not powering it means another. And with seven more LEDs you can even display 0-256 in binary.
[Miguel] is clearly in the latter camp. To make debugging-with-LEDs easy, he’s come up with …read more