Tag Archives: Lighting

Flywire Circuits at the Next Level

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The technique of assembling circuits without substrate goes by many names; you may know it as flywiring, deadbugging, point to point wiring, or freeform circuits. Sometimes this technique is used for practical purposes like fixing design errors post-production or escaping tiny BGA components (ok, that one might be more cool than practical). Perhaps our favorite use is to create art, and [Mohit Bhoite] is an absolute genius of the form. He’s so prolific that it’s difficult to point to a particular one of his projects as an exemplar, though he has a dusty blog we might recommend digging through [Mohit]’s …read more

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DIY Studio Lights To Improve Your Videos

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It’s 2018, a full thirteen years since YouTube was founded. With an online sharing service up and running, and high-resolution cameras in just about every mobile phone, the production of video has been democratized. Sadly, for those citizens with eyes, the production of good video is not so widespread. What’s one thing you need for good video? Good lighting – and you can build it yourself.

This build from [DIY Perks] relies upon readily available components and uses simple build techniques accessible to the average maker. Using cheap LED strips (albeit photography-grade ones), along with off-the-shelf plastics and dimmer modules, …read more

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Unphotogenic Lighting As A Feature

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Have you ever taken a picture indoors and had unsightly black bars interrupt your otherwise gorgeous photo? They are caused by lighting which flickers in and out in its normal operation. Some people can sense it easier than others without a camera. The inconsistent light goes out so briefly that we usually cannot perceive it but run-of-the-mill camera phones scan rows of pixels in sequence, and if there are no photons to detect while some rows are scanned, those black bars are the result. Annoying, right?

What if someone dressed that bug of light up as a feature? Instead of …read more

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ESP8266 Internet Controlled LED Dimmer

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There’s no shortage of debate about the “Internet of Things”, largely centered on security and questions about how much anyone really needs to be able to turn on their porch light from the other side of the planet. But while many of us are still wrestling with the realistic application of IoT gadgets, there’s undoubtedly those among us who have found ways to put this technology to work for them.

One such IoT devotee is [Sasa Karanovic], who writes in to tell us about his very impressive custom IoT LED dimmer based on the ESP8266. Rather than rely on a …read more

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Tesselated Worklights Are Nifty, Modular

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Electric lighting – is there anything it can’t do? Coming in all manner of forms and flavours, you can get everything from a compact reading lamp to a blindingly powerful worklight for your garage. Generally, different lights are built in different ways to suit their purpose, but it’s not the only way to do things. Enter [slisgrinder] and the MOSAIC Lighting System.

At its heart, MOSAIC is a way of building lighting rigs out of individual modules. Where it gets interesting is the design – they’re triangles! The boards carry a variety of LEDs and are laid out in a …read more

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Pavement Projection Provides Better Bicycle Visibility at Night

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Few would question the health benefits of ditching the car in favor of a bicycle ride to work — it’s good for the body, and it can be a refreshing relief from rat race commuting. But it’s not without its perils, especially when one works late and returns after dark. Most car versus bicycle accidents occur in the early evening, and most are attributed to drivers just not seeing cyclists in the waning light of day.

To decrease his odds of becoming a statistics and increase his time on two wheels, [Dave Schneider] decided to build a better bike light. …read more

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Building A Lightweight Softbox For Better Photography

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If you want to take good photographs, you need good light. Luckily for us, you can get reels and reels of LEDs from China for pennies, power supplies are ubiquitous, and anyone can solder up a few LED strips. The missing piece of the puzzle is a good enclosure for all these LEDs, and a light diffuser.

[Eric Strebel] recently needed a softbox for some product shots, and came up with this very cheap, very good lighting solution. It’s made from aluminum so it should handle the rigors of photography, and it’s absolutely loaded with LEDs to get all that …read more

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How To Control the Lights with a TV Remote

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In this day and age of the Internet of Things and controlling appliances over the internet, the idea of using an old-fashioned television remote to do anything feels distinctly 2005. That doesn’t mean it’s not a valid way to control the lights at home, and [Atakan] is here to show us how it’s done.

To the experienced electronics maker, this is yesterday’s jam, but [Atakan] goes to great lengths to hash out the whole process from start to finish, from building the circuitry to switch the lights through to the code necessary to make a PIC do your bidding. It’s …read more

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ESP32 Makes Not-So-Smart Lights Smart

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Long taken for granted – lights are a basic necessity of modern life. From the time of the first light bulb, we’ve been able to navigate the dark without the use of fire. With the advent of the Internet of Things, it has become somewhat of a requirement to bring a little intelligence to lights before labeling yourself as a hardware hacker. There are many ways to do this; one of the most common being making use of an ESP32. [Luca Dentella] is somewhat of an ESP32 expert, and has written a fantastic tutorial on how to use the chip. …read more

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Aluminum Foil Heatsink Keeps LEDs in Check

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In your kitchen is very likely a roll of aluminum foil, like most people you probably use it to line pans or wrap food for baking. If you heard somebody used aluminum foil in the cooling of items, you could be forgiven for thinking they were referring to wrapping leftovers and tossing them in the refrigerator. But rather than preserving Mom’s famous meatloaf, [Michael Dunn] is using that classic kitchen staple to protect his LED strips.

Cheap LED strips are becoming extremely popular and have been popping up in more and more projects, but they have a pretty serious flaw: …read more

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