Category Archives: lighting effect

Experiment With Lumia, The Cheap and Easy Way

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Light is a wonderful medium for art, and there’s all manner of ways to approach it. We’ve always been huge fans of all that blinks and glows, but there’s a whole wide world of other methods and techniques in the lighting arena. Lumia is one that does not always get a lot of mainstream attention, and so [Adam Raugh] has created this video, sharing both the history of the effect, and various ways to create it yourself. 

Lumia was once used to refer to a broad swathe of artistic lighting, but these days, more commonly refers to effects that create …read more

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Arduino Powered Arcade Button Lighting Effects

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As if you already weren’t agonizing over whether or not you should build your own arcade cabinet, add this one to the list of compelling reasons why you should dedicate an unreasonable amount of physical space to playing games you’ve probably already got emulated on your phone. [Rodrigo] writes in to show off his project to add some flair to the lighted buttons on his arcade controller. (Google Translate)

The wiring for this project is about as easy as you’d expect: the buttons connect to the digital inputs on the Arduino, and the LEDs on the digital outputs. When the …read more

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A Very Large VU Meter Indeed

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It used to be a must-have on any hi-fi, a pair of moving coil meters or LED bar graphs, the VU meter. Your 1980s boombox would have had them, for example. VU, for “Volume Units”, is a measure of audio level, and the fashion for its visual measure in consumer audio equipment seems now to have largely passed.

The LED bar graph VU meters were invariably driven by the LM3915, a chip that contains a resistor ladder and a stack of comparators which can drive LEDs directly. [Juvar] has taken an LM3915, and used it to drive a set of …read more

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