Builing a bigger bar graph

May 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Take a gander at the Giant LED bar graph which [Chunky Hampton] recently completed (from this image we don’t think the nick name suits him). It’s simple both mechanically and electrically, but we love the look and think it would be a nice addition to your home, hackerspace, or as a children’s museum exhibit (we’re looking at you [Mr. Porter]).

The enclosure is a hunk of PVC electrical conduit. It’s got to be one of the largest sizes, but still should be found at most home stores. The base mounts easily and the cover snaps into place. [Chunky] used a hole saw to create the openings for the LED modules. They’re circular boards with multiple single-color LEDs on them. A common power bus feeds the high side of each bit, while a couple of transistor ICs controlled by 595 shift registers address them on the low side. From there just use any controller you wish, but in this case it’s an Arduino.

[Chunky] uses the meter to display power output from his stationary bicycle generator. But he also put together a little Larson Scanner demo which you can see after the break.

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Filed Under: led hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

LED matrix shield starts with a very loud snap

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We see a lot of LED matrix projects. They’re fun, and you can learn a lot of basic lessons during the build. But this one is out of the ordinary. [Rtty21] built an oddly sized, and sound controlled matrix shield for his Arduino. That’s it right there, the shield is the large chunk of protoboard but you can just see the Arduino peeking up over the top of it.

Now we say oddly sized because a 9×9 matrix doesn’t make much sense with an 8-bit micro controller. There’s no schematic but in the clip after the break he mentions that the columns and rows are driven by a decade counter and shift register and that’s what makes it possible to drive nine bits easily. Also of note on the board is that washer above and to the right of the matrix. It’s a touch-sensitive reset button. But the main control mechanism is a Clapper clone circuit. Just snap your fingers and it turns the project on or off. [Rtty21] based the design on this step-by-step sound input build.

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Filed Under: arduino hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,

[David] hand soldered a Blinky ball… and you can too!

April 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is a blinky ball that [David] designed, built, and programmed himself. Does it look familiar? It should, he took his inspiration from the original prototype, and the Hackerspace-produced derivative. [David’s] version is not as small, or as blinky, but in our minds the development process is the real reason for building something like this. He took a great idea and figured out how he could pull it off while pushing his skill set, staying within his time and budget constraints.

The project is powered by an Arduino nano which resides in the core of the ball. [David] used protoboard sourced locally for each of the slices, soldering green LEDs along the curved edges, and added shift registers to drive them. The ball is driven by a LiPo battery which can power it for about 45 minutes. You can see the animation designs he coded in the clip after the break.

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Filed Under: led hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,

Arduino MIDI sequencer displays a lot of data

April 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This Arduino MIDI sequencer has no shortage of ways to display loop info. The screen above is a touch-sensitive interface that acts as the user input. But if this screen is not visible, you can still see which tracks have activated samples for each beat and what effects are being used. That’s thanks to the collection of display boards which are shown in the video after the break.

The setup acts as the MIDI front end, relying on other hardware to generate the samples. It presents all of the options through several pages on the 320×240 touch screen display. The Ardunio Mega is responsible for monitoring the UI data, crafting and sending the MIDI commands, as well as updating the LED-based display boards. These include bar graphs for the various effects, a four row by sixteen pixel beat pattern display, and 7-segment displays to track the current location within the loop. All in that’s 368 LEDs driven by 18 shift registers.

Update: Link to a gallery can be found after the break as well.

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Filed Under: arduino hacks, musical hacks Tagged With: , , ,