Why spend time in a crowded and cold times square when you can make your OWN Times Square LED ball? Perfect for new years eve, disco parties, weddings, raves, bar mitzvahs, or just a romantic night in. This DIY LED Disco Ball is made using Adafruit’s 12mm LED pixels, an Arduino and two 2.4GHz XBee’s (for wireless disco control!). The LED pattern is controlled by the open source graphics language, Processing so it works on Windows, Mac or Linux computers. The ball pattern is made of a dozen laser cut acrylic panels that are ziptied together and the hanging cord is also the power supply cable (HD video here).
We’ll have a full tutorial after the new year so stay tuned and get your leisure suit to the cleaners!
The weekly show-and-tell is tonight at 9:30pm ET. A special New Year’s eve one too! We’ll see who shows up!
NEW INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO BE ON THE SHOW AND TELL. If you are on Google+ and want to join, post a message/comment on Limor’s post on Google+ and say you want to show off a project and she will add you the “Show and Tell” circle. Then just look for the hangout announcement on the very same page later for your invite. There’s an 8 to 10 (at the same time) people limit per hangout, so if it’s full try later or just pop by next week same time. Some weeks are packed!
At 9:30pm ET you will see a link to the hang out. Just keep your mics muted until we call on you and have your project ready.
Google is allowing some accounts to broadcast and record – Ladyada is trying this out, with your help
Previously we broadcasted the hangouts on Google to Ustream using their Producer tool to capture the hangout. We’re still using Ustream for “ASK AN ENGINEER”.
So if anything goes wrong, it’s all very new, but that’s also part of the fun
NEW PRODUCT – Alpha Clock Five – From Evil Mad Scientist Labs! Evil Mad Scientist Labs never disappoints with their fantastic kits and clocks. The Alpha Clock Five is no exception: An awesome alarm clock soldering kit– featuring five crazy-bright, crazy huge 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays in red, a Chronodot RTC (for precise quartz timing, complete with battery backup) and a handsome laser-cut acrylic case.
These big 18-segment alphanumeric LED displays are notoriously difficult to drive– there are 54 LED elements inside each LED character and the different segments take different amounts of current. We’ve now made it easy to drive five at a time, and wrapped it all up in neat package with classic alarm-clock styling.
Standard Features of Alpha Clock Five:
Extremely wide display brightness range. All the way from very dim (for dark bedrooms) all the way up to annoyingly bright
Huge 2.3″ (5.8 cm) tall digits are easy to see, even if you normally wear glasses
Alarm on-off indicator
Four standard alarm tones
Snooze function
12-hour (AM/PM) and 24-hour clock modes
Rear-panel white LED nightlight; can be turned on or off from the options menu
Sturdy acrylic case features subtle, laser-engraved button labels
Transparent rear panel lets you show off your handiwork
Comes complete with plug-in power supply and backup battery
Microcontroller comes pre-programmmed; no programming is required
Hacker-friendly Design:
Open source hardware design– easy to hack!
Open source software design– easy to reprogram (if you want to)!
Upgradeable firmware
Based on the ATmega644A microcontroller with 64 kB of flash, with plenty of room to grow.
Comes pre-flashed with Sanguino bootloader; can be programmed through Arduino IDE (with extensions).
6-pin TTL-serial connector, can be used to display data or time sent from computer
Unused I/O pins are broken out from the microcontroller, including one ADC and 5+ GPIO
Open-frame case design gives easy access to serial connector and reset button
Alpha Clock Five kit configurations:
The full (non-basic) Alpha Clock Five kit– available on this page –comes complete with the beautifully made Alpha Clock circuit board, the five alphanumeric LED displays (ultrabright red, 2.3″ character height, with upper and lower decimal points), machine pin sockets for those displays, pre-programmed ATmega644A microcontroller with Sanguino bootloader, 5 tactile button switches, 20 ppm quartz crystal, universal-input plug-in power supply, stainless mounting hardware, alarm buzzer, all of the the LED driver chips, transistors, resistors, capacitors and other little parts needed to build the kit, plus a Chronodot real-time-clock module and a handsome laser-cut acrylic case.
The Alpha Clock circuit board is 9.430 X 2.736″ in overall size, and extra stiff at 0.094″ thick. It has a black soldermask and gold plated finish. Once assembled with its case, Alpha Clock Five is approximately 9.44″ wide, 3.78″ tall, and 2.80″ deep.
ChronoDot
Alpha Clock Five comes complete with a Chronodot real-time clock module. It provides your clock kit with (1) a higher accuracy quartz crystal oscillator, (2) a backup battery, and (3) extra geek cred for having a TCXO-based RTC. The included battery is estimated to last for 7 years.
USB-TTL Cable
You may be interested to add an optional FTDI USB-TTL converter cable, which provides an optional interface between your computer and your clock. It can be used (1) to sync the clock’s time to the time on your PC, (2) to reprogram the clock through (a modified version of) the Arduino IDE, or (3) to send serial data to display on the five-character LED display. Note, however, that these are entirely optional operations– no programming is needed to build or use an Alpha Clock Five clock kit!
Power supply
The Alpha Clock Five kit includes a universal-input power supply that will work with worldwide voltages. The plug is a power-strip-friendly US type, so you may need an inexpensive “grocery store” plug adapter to fit the wall socket in your country.
If you need to provide power from an alternate source, Alpha Clock Five requires (and provides hookup locations for) a regulated 5 V dc power supply with 1 A capacity
NEW PRODUCT – SMT RGB 5050 LED – 10 pack! These surface-mount LEDs are an easy way to add a lot of colorful dots to your project. They’re similar to the ones in our digital RGB LED strip, same size and shape. They are half a centimeter on a side, which makes them small but not so small that they are impossible to hand solder. There are three LEDs inside, red green and blue and because they are so close together, they mix very nicely, without the need for a diffuser. The LED is also insanely bright, at a eyeball-blistering 3800mcd.
Comes in a strip of 10 pieces. If you order more than one strip, it will come as multiple strips of 10, not one long strip.
December 31st will mark my first full calendar year writing on the Adafruit blog. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank ladyada and pt for giving me this great opportunity to put a little bit of myself out into the world. Even more, I’d like to thank all of you for your readership and comments — it wouldn’t be possible without you!
My personal rule for posting on the blog is that I never post anything I wouldn’t want to read about. 2011 has been a great year in that regard, because there are so many awesome projects, events and other things that I got to write about. The following is a list of my “Top 12″, one from each month, sometimes with honorable mentions or runners-up. I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane as much as I enjoyed putting it together:
This project caused some controversy. After I posted it here, Becky posted it on MAKE, and from there it went all over the place — attracting lovers and haters alike. Personally, I still think it’s pretty cool.
Phew! It’s been quite a year, and I look forward to doing it again in 2012!
Once again, I’d just like to say thanks to all of you who read this blog, submit projects, and leave comments. I wish you all a happy, healthy, and project-filled 2012!
The logistic map is one of the simplest nonlinear dynamical systems that clearly exhibit the route to chaos. In this paper, we explored the evolution of the logistic map using an open-source microcontroller connected to an array of light emitting diodes (LEDs). We divided the one dimensional interval [0, 1] into ten equal parts, and associated and LED to each segment. Every time an iteration took place a corresponding LED turned on indicating the value returned by the logistic map. By changing some initial conditions of the system, we observed the transition from order to chaos exhibited by the map.
Last weekend I finally mostly-finished the project I’ve been working on, on and off, for the last several months. My Master Control Project, or MCP*, was designed to be a central controller and information display that would sit on my desk in my livingroom, and give me all sorts of useful information while allowing me to control various things.
The idea grew out of my DIY thermostat project – after getting a taste of what could be done with an Arduino and an ethernet connection, I wanted more!
I say “partially” self-balancing because it only balances along one axis (forward/backward), and the rider still needs to balance left and right (it’s analagous to riding a bicycle “no hands”). It operates much like a Segway — you lean forward to accelerate, and lean back to brake. The top speed is about 15 mph, and it easily goes 5 miles on a single charge. This is my primary mode of transportation on the MIT campus.
NEW PRODUCT – 1.8 SPI TFT display, 160×128 18-bit color – ST7735R driver. We just love this little 1.8″ TFT display, with true TFT color (up to 18-bits per pixel!), fine 160×128 resolution, two white LED backlight that runs on 3.3V and a very easy SPI interface that requires only 4 or 5 digital pins to send pixels to the display.
Please note! This is just the raw display, not attached to a PCB or for use with a breadboard. If you want to use this out of the box with no surface mount soldering, check out our fully assembled 1.8″ TFT breakout board with microSD card holder. This display is for experts who are comfortable soldering a surface mount display using fine pitch soldering techniques! This display also is for 3.3V use only, so be sure to use a level shifter if you’re going to use it with 5.0V microcontrollers.
NEW PRODUCT – Arduino Mega 2560 R3 (Atmega2560 – assembled). This is the new Arduino Mega R3. NEW VERSION! This is the Arduino Mega R3. The Arduino Mega 2560 is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega2560. It has 54 digital input/output pins (of which 14 can be used as PWM outputs), 16 analog inputs, 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started. The Mega is compatible with most shields designed for the Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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