Posts Tagged ‘LED’

Diskokugel Eyecandy

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

To motivate myself (and to keep you entertained) I’ll show you some pictures of the recent progress.

With my bold head glittering from cold sweat I took a soldering iron and separated my nice round [Kugel wireframe] into segments again. Luckily that went well, if I ignore that I had to buy a new power iron because the old one broke for no apparent reason(it was exactly one! day over its warranty). To those elements I attached my freshly cut [mirror balls]. I also took the [useless PCBs] as dummies and attached the to the icosahedron inside. I then tried to figure out a pattern how to attach the speakers to the PCBs inside, which was a bit tricky because the cables wont be distributed evenly.

Anyway: having a party in our place there was a need to clean up and make things look good. As it turns out, putting a light inside the existing object makes it quite flahy. But see for yourself…

A little LED-Lamp

Monday, February 28th, 2011

I built a lamp for my girlfriend. It’s quite simple: I took a rotating part of a lamp I broke some time ago (some stupid aquarium simulation), a spare 3 color Cree LED and chicken wire. A little cheesy but quite nice. If you lie on the ground an watch it for some time, the spiral seems to stop and the room rotates instead.

 

The LED lamp

the knob lets you choose the color or the speed the color changes

color LED lamp

the turning mechanism

inside: a 12V power supply and a constant current supply for the led, an atmega 328 (arduino)

Of course, the Atmega32-8 is completely oversized for such a project, but it was at hand and programmable via the Arduino. I’m sure the extra constant current supply is also obsolete, but I didn’t get to try otherwise. Comments how to optimize the setup are always appreciated.

Tech Stuff

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

My current task is to build some stuff for the Computerspiele Museum. Thats not as exciting as it sounds, however it totally fits to the stuff I’ve been doing over the last months. An interface/video player is to be controlled using a joystick while LEDs are lit correspondingly. Again, Christian was very helpful here and provided me with a basic idea, how to build this. The plan changed various times since at first I was told I had to work with 12V LEDs, no one knows why. That sounded easy at first because I thought I could simply take those LED clusters that replace common halogen lights. But it turned out that most of them are not dimmable, unless you take really expensive ones (~€ 30,-). So now I use 3W ones on a heat sink. looks quite nice.

I even found a shop to buy arcade hardware such as knobs, joysticks etc. Sure there’ll be more fun with that soon :-)

to illustrate the current affairs