Awesome Maker, and even awesomer Dad Kristoffer Dominic Amora dropped us a link to his Google gallery of pictures from the “working” arc reactor he made for his son to wear to the new Iron Man movie a little while back. It’s a great medly of repurposed parts and creativity, and you can see from the smiles on Rayne’s face that the effort was more than worth it. See select pictures above, or check out out Kristoffer’s galley to more.
Collin Cunningham’s videos remain golden! In Circuit Skills: LED Matrix he talks about LED matrices and how to control the LEDs with a multiplexing IC. He uses it to make a mini game machine! Many an experimenter, hacker, tinkerer, & maker have heeded the call of the mighty matrix – and it’s no mystery why. […]
June’s Component of the Month is the diode, and a 7-segment display actually consists of seven light-emitting diodes! So, why not matrix them up? Skot Croshere built a matrix out of 512 7-segment displays: he calls it the DigitGrid: The DigitGrid is an array of seven-segment displays. There are 4096 LEDs, forming 512 7-segment digits […]
Stephen Richardson of Tangent Audio built the AZIZ light ring for his Bausch & Lomb stereo microscope. AZIZ is an LED microscope illuminator that I designed and built from scratch. It is designed around a Texas Instruments TLC59116 constant-current PWM LED driver chip, and an Atmel ATTiny1634 AZIZ has 64 LEDs, half super-bright and half […]
We kick off June with an excerpt from Syuzi Pakhchyan’s excellent resource for wearable tech, Fashioning Technology. Want to learn more about LEDs and diodes? We’ll be covering them all this month.
Another cool wearables project from Adafruit Director of Wearable Electronics and MAKE alum Becky Stern. In this design, Becky is showing off the capabilities of Adafruit’s FLORA wearable color sensor. She’s sewn it into a circuit with a FLORA microcontroller and 12 FLORA RGB LEDs, on a ruffled scarf designed to diffuse the light and give a softer effect.
MAKE contributor Andy has created a great tutorial to introduce you to the utility of “Charlieplexing,” a method for controlling multiple LEDs without the use of multiple microcontroller pins. With charlieplexing you can turn on or off one LED at a time. To light more than one LED at a time, you can scan the LEDs by turning a sequence of them on and off really fast.
