Category Archives: ws2812b

Enter the Space Tunnel

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What’s better than 1 string of LED lights? 96. That’s how many. Each string of the 96 has 60 ws2812b LEDs, for a total of 5760 individually addressable RGB LEDs.  That’s not the cool part of [jaymeekae]’s Space Tunnel installation, the cool part is that they’re interactive.

Starting out with some PVC piping, dark cloth was used as a backdrop and the LED strips were attached to it. Several power supplies are used to supply the voltage necessary and each strip controlled by FadeCandy chips which connect to, in this case, a Windows PC via USB. Initially, computer power supplies …read more

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Beautiful Linear RGB Clock

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Yup, another clock project. But here, [Jan] builds something that would be more at home in a modern art museum than in the dark recesses of a hacker cave. It’s not hard to read the time at all, it’s accurate, and it’s beautiful. It’s a linear RGB LED wall clock.

You won’t have to learn the resistor color codes or bizarre binary encodings to tell what time it is. There are no glitzy graphics here, or modified classic timepieces. This project is minimal, clean, and elegant. Twelve LEDs display the hours, six and nine LEDs take care of the minutes …read more

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Cheap LCD TV gets cheaper fix

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Most hacks need some fair bit of skill and knowledge if you want to come out successful at the other end. Others, you just plunge in blindly with a “heck, it’s already broken so I can’t make it any worse” attitude. Throwing caution to the wind, you dive in, rip things up, and see if you can manage to catch the bull by the horns.

[Jim]’s cheap LCD TV, barely a few years old, died. It was purchased from the store whose blue polo-shirted cashiers can drive you nuts with their incessant questions. [Jim] just rolled up his sleeves and …read more

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Huge Interactive Crossword

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Give kids some responsible and challenging tasks, and you’d be surprised at the results. The “Anything Goes” exhibit at the National Museum in Warsaw was aimed as a museological and educational experiment. A group of 69 children aged 6–14 was divided into teams responsible for preparing the main temporary exhibition at the museum. Over six months, they worked on preparing the exhibition during weekly four-hour meetings. They prepared scripts, provided ideas for multimedia presentations, and curated almost 300 works for display. One of those was [Robert Mordzon]’s Giant Interactive Crossword.

The build is in two parts. The letter tiles, which …read more

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Huge Interactive Crossword

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Give kids some responsible and challenging tasks, and you’d be surprised at the results. The “Anything Goes” exhibit at the National Museum in Warsaw was aimed as a museological and educational experiment. A group of 69 children aged 6–14 was divided into teams responsible for preparing the main temporary exhibition at the museum. Over six months, they worked on preparing the exhibition during weekly four-hour meetings. They prepared scripts, provided ideas for multimedia presentations, and curated almost 300 works for display. One of those was [Robert Mordzon]’s Giant Interactive Crossword.

The build is in two parts. The letter tiles, which …read more

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WS2812B LED Clones: Work Better Than Originals!

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Commodity electronics manufacturing is a tough game. If you come out with a world-beating product, like WorldSemi did with the WS2812B addressable RGB LED “pixel”, you can be pretty sure that you’re going to be cloned in fairly short order. And we’re all used to horror stories of being sold clones instead of what was ordered. But what if the clones were actually an improvement?

[Gonazar] bought some strips of “WS2812” LEDs and prototyped a project. When stepping up to larger production, he thought he’d go directly to WorldSemi. Long story short, the cheaper LED modules that he’d previously …read more

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LED Strip Display Gives You Two Ways to See the Music

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What to call this LED strip music visualizer is a puzzler. It lights up and pulsates in time with music similar to the light organs of 1970s psychedelia fame, but it’s more than that. Is it more like the Larson Scanner that graced the front of [David Hasselhoff]’s ride on Knight Rider? A little, but not quite.

Whatever you decide to call this thing, it looks pretty cool, and [Scott Lawson] provides not one but two ways to build it. The business end is a simple strip of WS2812b addressable LEDs. It looks like the first incarnation of the …read more

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Jenkins Lights the Christmas Tree

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Jenkins is open-source automation software that tries to automate parts of the software development process. When you submit code, for example, Jenkins will grab it, build the project with it and run any tests on it. If you have a large number of people submitting new code or data, Jenkins will wait and grab a bunch of the submissions to build. Depending on the size of the project, this can take a while, and if there’s a problem, you need to know quickly so that people aren’t waiting on a broken build. Email’s fine for this, but [dkt01] saw one …read more

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Colorful, Touch-Sensitive Light Table is Ready for Gaming

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It’s an ambitious build for sure — you don’t start with $500 worth of wood if you don’t intend for the finished product to dazzle. And this 240-pixel touch-sensitive light box coffee table does indeed dazzle.

Sometimes when we see such builds as these, fit and finish take a back seat to function. [dasdingo89] bucks that trend with a nicely detailed build, starting with the choice of zebrawood for the table frame. The bold grain and the frosted glass top make for a handsome table, but what lurks beneath the glass is pretty special too. The 240 WS2812 modules live …read more

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Colorful, Touch-Sensitive Light Table is Ready for Gaming

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It’s an ambitious build for sure — you don’t start with $500 worth of wood if you don’t intend for the finished product to dazzle. And this 240-pixel touch-sensitive light box coffee table does indeed dazzle.

Sometimes when we see such builds as these, fit and finish take a back seat to function. [dasdingo89] bucks that trend with a nicely detailed build, starting with the choice of zebrawood for the table frame. The bold grain and the frosted glass top make for a handsome table, but what lurks beneath the glass is pretty special too. The 240 WS2812 modules live …read more

Continue reading Colorful, Touch-Sensitive Light Table is Ready for Gaming→