One Man Is Bringing Magic Lantern Shows Back from the Dead
In a small Amish town, ‘Professor Firefly’ is reviving a lost art that once occupied the space of movies and TV. Continue reading One Man Is Bringing Magic Lantern Shows Back from the Dead
Tag Archives: Light
Shocking Halloween Decoration
Sure, you could animate some Halloween lights using a microcontroller, some random number generation and some LEDs, and if the decorations are powered by AC, you could use some relays with your microcontroller. What if you don’t have that kind of time? [Gadget Addict] had some AC powered decorations that he’d previously animated with an Arduino and some relays, but this year wanted to do something quicker and simpler.
In another video, he goes over the wiring of a fluorescent starter to create a flickering effect with an incandescent light bulb. A fluorescent starter works because the current heats up …read more
Minecraft Sword Lights Up When Nearby Friends
With All Hallow’s Eve looming close, makers have the potential to create some amazing costumes we’ll remember for the rest of the year. If you’re a fan of the hugely addict-*cough* popular game Minecraft, perhaps you’ve considered cosplaying as your favorite character skin, but lacked the appropriate props. [Graham Kitteridge] and his friends have decided to pay homage to the game by making their own light-up Minecraft swords.
These swords use 3D-printed and laser-cut parts, designed so as to hide the electronics for the lights and range finder in the hilt. Range finder? Oh, yes, the sword uses an Arduino …read more
Continue reading Minecraft Sword Lights Up When Nearby Friends
Minecraft Sword Lights Up When Nearby Friends
With All Hallow’s Eve looming close, makers have the potential to create some amazing costumes we’ll remember for the rest of the year. If you’re a fan of the hugely addict-*cough* popular game Minecraft, perhaps you’ve considered cosplaying as your favorite character skin, but lacked the appropriate props. [Graham Kitteridge] and his friends have decided to pay homage to the game by making their own light-up Minecraft swords.
These swords use 3D-printed and laser-cut parts, designed so as to hide the electronics for the lights and range finder in the hilt. Range finder? Oh, yes, the sword uses an Arduino …read more
Continue reading Minecraft Sword Lights Up When Nearby Friends
Blooming Flower Lamp Will Test Your 3D Printer
[ossum] has a baby on the way. He admits that he got a bit carried away, brimming with parental excitement. What resulted is a fully articulated LED WiFi lamp that blooms and glows dramatically in the friendly confines of the oncoming baby’s room.
We’ve covered [ossum]’s work before. As usual, he started off by showing his complete mastery of Fusion360 and making the rest of us look bad. If you want to learn 360, we recommend scrobbing through his models to see how it’s done. The base encloses an ESP8266 and a hobby servo. A clever mechanism pulls down on …read more
Continue reading Blooming Flower Lamp Will Test Your 3D Printer
Bamboo Plant Becomes A Stylish Light Switch
If flipping a regular old light switch or pressing buttons isn’t an adequately pleasing way to use your appliances around the house, how about poking at the leaves of a plant to turn on your lamp? [Xkitz] has provided a thorough breakdown of how to turn any conductive object in your living space into a nifty capacitive touch switch that adds a bit of charm to such an everyday action.
Creating an electrostatic field around a conductive medium, the capacitive touch relay constantly monitors this field and will toggle when any minuscule change to the capacitance is detected. …read more
Continue reading Bamboo Plant Becomes A Stylish Light Switch
Hackaday Prize Entry: Cheap Visible Light Communication
[Jovan] is very excited about the possibilities presented by Visible Light Communication, or VLC. It’s exciting and new. His opening paragraphs is filled with so many networking acronyms that VLC could be used for, our browser search history now looks like we’re trying to learn english without any vowels.
In lots of ways he has good reason to be excited. We all know that IR can communicate quite a bit, but when you’re clever about frequency and color and throw in some polarizers with a mix of clever algorithms for good measure you can get some very high bandwidth communication …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: Cheap Visible Light Communication
NES Light Gun Fires Awesome Laser Effect
[Seb Lee-Delisle]’s NES lightgun gave us pause as the effect is so cool we couldn’t quite figure out how he was doing it at first. When he pulls the trigger there erupts the beam of light Sci Fi has trained us to expect, then it explodes in a precision sunburst of laserlight at the other end as smoke gently trails from the end of the barrel. This is a masterpiece of hardware and trickery.
The gun itself is a gutted Nintendo accessory. It looks like gun’s added bits consist of two LED strips, a laser module (cleverly centered with two …read more
20kW Light Is As Bright As You’d Expect
[Photonicinduction] purchased a very very bright light. This 20,000 Watt half meter tall halogen will just about light the back of a person’s skull with their eyes closed. These are typically used to light film sets.
Most people couldn’t even turn such a light on, but [Photonicinduction] is a mad scientist. Making lightning in his attic, it’s easy to mentally picture him as the villain in a Sherlock Holmes novel. Luckily for us, if he has any evil tendencies, they are channeled into YouTube videos.
He gives a good description of the mechanical and electrical properties of the light. The …read more
DIY Smart Home Device Means No More Fumbling in the Dark
Smart home tech is on the rise, but cost or lack of specific functionality may give pause to prospective buyers. [Whiskey Tango Hotel] opted to design their own system using a Raspberry Pi and Bluetooth device connectivity. Combining two ubiquitous technologies provides a reliable proximity activation of handy functions upon one’s arrival home.
The primary function is to turn on a strip of LEDs when [Whiskey Tango Hotel] gets home to avoid fumbling for the lights in the dark, and to turn them off after a set time. The Raspberry Pi and Bluetooth dongle detect when a specified discoverable Bluetooth …read more
Continue reading DIY Smart Home Device Means No More Fumbling in the Dark