Category Archives: ws2812b

Stecchino Game is all about Balancing a Big Toothpick

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Self-described “Inventor Dad” [pepelepoisson]’s project is called Stecchino (English translation link here) and it’s an Arduino-based physical balancing game that aims to be intuitive to use and play for all ages. Using the Stecchino (‘toothpick’ in Italian) consists of balancing the device on your hand and trying to keep it upright for as long as possible. The LED strip fills up as time passes, and it keeps records of high scores. It was specifically designed to be instantly understood and simple to use by people of all ages, and we think it has succeeded in this brilliantly.

To sense orientation …read more

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Arduino BabyTV is Big Fun at Low Resolution

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What kind of TV do you have? An older 720p model, or the now standard 1080p? Perhaps you’ve made the leap to the next generation, and are rocking a 4K display in the living room. All those are are fine and dandy if you just want to watch the local sportball contest, but where’s the challenge in that? With all the technology and modular components we have access to anymore, nowadays all the real hackers are making their own TVs.

Of course, when [Nikolai] built his very own LED TV, he did have to make a few concessions. For one …read more

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The Engineering Case for Fusing Your LED Strips

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Modern LED strips are magical things. The WS2812 has allowed the quick and easy creation of addressable RGB installations, revolutionizing the science of cool glowy things. However, this accessibility means that it’s easy to get in over your head and make some simple mistakes that could end catastrophically. [Thomas] is here to help, outlining a common mistake made when building with LED strips that is really rather dangerous.

The problem is the combination of hardware typically used to run these LED strings. They’re quite bright and draw significant amounts of power, each pixel drawing up to 60 mA at full-white. …read more

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Interactive LED Table

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Some hackers make functional things that you can’t allow to be seen in polite company. Others make beautiful things that could come from a high-end store. [Marija] falls into the second category and her interactive LED coffee table would probably fetch quite a bit on the retail market. You can see a video of the awesome-looking table, below.

It isn’t just the glass, MDF, and pine construction. There’s also a Bluetooth interface to a custom Android application from [Dejan], who collaborated on the project. However, if you aren’t comfortable with the woodworking, [Marija’s] instructions are very detailed with great pictures …read more

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Smartphone Controlled Periodic Table of Elements

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It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that here at Hackaday, we’re about as geeky as they come. Having said that, even we were surprised to hear that there are people out there who collect elements. Far be it from us to knock how anyone else wishes to fill their days, but telling somebody at a party that you collect chemical elements is like one step up from saying you’ve got a mold and fungus collection at home. Even then, at least a completed mold and fungus collection won’t be radioactive.

But if you’re going to spend …read more

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A Mini Stacker Arcade Cabinet

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For [LumoW], what started as a school project turned into a passion project. He and his team made a hardware implementation of an arcade game called Stacker. Never heard of it? It’s pretty fun, kind of like an inverse Tetris. You can play the flash version here and see their mini arcade version after the break.

The game is based around the Mojo FPGA which the class required, and it’s programmed entirely in bitwise operators. It uses WS2812 RGB LEDs to represent the individual tower building blocks, and these are mounted on plywood in a matrix and separated into cells …read more

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Touch Panels Make This Christmas Tree Interactive

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The city of Liverpool, famously known as both the home port of the Titanic and the birthplace of The Beatles, also seems to have a thing for interactive public art installations. Witness this huge interactive Christmas tree that can be played by passersby.

The display in the city’s busy Williamson Square was commissioned by a municipal business group and built by [Adrian McEwen]. The idea was to adorn the 10-meter natural tree with large geometric ornaments covered with Neopixel strips. [Adrian] documents the build process in some detail, including that fact that over 170 meters of WS2812b strips went into …read more

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Hackaday Links: April 16, 2017

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Guess what’s going on at the end of the month? The Vintage Computer Festival Southeast is happening April 29th and 30th. The event is being held at the Computer Museum of America and is, by all accounts, a really cool show.

Walk into any package sorting facility or Amazon fulfillment center and you’ll find a maze of conveyor belts, slides, and ramps that move boxes from one point to another. Conveyor belts are so last century, so here’s a fleet of robots.

In 2017, the CITES treaty — an international treaty for the protection of endangered species — changed a …read more

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A Wordsearch Twist on the Word Clock

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We love seeing new takes on existing ideas, and [Danny] certainly took the word clock concept in an unusual direction with his Wordsearch Clock. Instead of lighting up words to spell out the time, [Danny] decided to embrace the fact that the apparent jumble of letters on the clock face resembles a word search puzzle.

In a word search puzzle, words can be found spelled forward or backward with letters lined up horizontally, diagonally, or vertically. All that matters is that the correct letters are in a line and sequentially adjacent to one another. [Danny]’s clock lights up the correct …read more

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Build Your Own Animated Turn Signals

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Automotive lighting used to be strictly controlled, particularly in the United States — anyone remember sealed beam headlamps? These days, pretty much anything goes. You can even have an animated turn signal, because a simple flash isn’t fancy enough these days. You can get a scanning-LED turn signal on your new model Audi, among others. [Shravan] wanted this on their Mazda and set about building an animated turn signal and daytime running lights setup for their car.

It’s not a complicated build by any means; an off-the-shelf WS2812B strip provides the blinkums, an Arduino Nano the smarts. Using a modified …read more

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