Composed from a 1.1 meter diameter balloon, ‘fluff’, the interactive lighting system by japanese design studio tangent is a floating luminous body that creates dramatic spatial environments. the installation changes the color and rhythm of its light according to sound and video screens. With the concept, the lucent bodies lift from the walls like floating particles of air, emitting an illuminating presence from inside the space. The surroundings are filled with light instead of rather than being lit up from the surface – achieving a new experience that immerses the user into visual choreography.
Internal LED react to music and video internally, creating glowing orbs that seem to dance to the music around them:
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
A friend of mine, Alex, is building his own Tardis, and needed a hand with the light on top. I cobbled this together in a couple of hours and thought I’d share it.
Digital RGB LED Weatherproof Strip 32 LED – (1m) – These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 7-bit PWM precision (so 21-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 2 digital output pins are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you. (read more)
The main driving force to develop the LED Matrix Link was to display messages at my wedding in May. The idea was to have guests be able to send messages to it during the reception. I decided to use Twitter since most people use it and there are plenty of code examples to get me started. Good thing I have a Ethernet shield I got on clearance at Radio Shack, perfect project to put it to use. I am not sure this will be the final design since I have to figure out the best way to get Internet at the reception.
When I started writing the code I only had two LED Matrix Links to play with so I used the Arduino Leonardo. As I added more code for Ethernet and Twitter functions, I quickly ran out of SRAM so I needed to find a microcontroller with more SRAM in my stash. I had two options, the Arduino Mega 2560 or the Arduino Due Beta. I quickly ruled out the Arduino Due for now since it is 3.3v even though the Ethernet Shield will work as the MAX7219 needs 5v. (It turns out I could use the AS1107 which only needs 2.7v but I would have to swap out the 33k resistor for a lower value to maintain brightness.) So the Arduino Mega 2560 it is!
Mixing code from this project (http://www.mobilewill.us/2012/10/new-project-sneak-peek.html) and this forum post I was able to get a tweet based on a hashtag search to show up on the display. The code uses a unauthenticated API so this limits how many times you can query Twitter per hour. Generally you don’t want to do more once or twice per minute. My first thought was I am sure sometimes I am going to get more than one tweet per minute. Hmmm…. After some research and playing with the Twitter API I added a loop to read all of the tweets up to a certain time. So say you want the last hour of tweets it will keep reading tweets from the Ethernet stream until the time-stamp is an hour prior to the first received tweet. This helps limit the memory used and allows you to cycle those tweets on the display….
Make your origami glow! It’s easy to make a simple circuit illuminating any origami form. This tutorial will show you how to make a paper lotus flower and frog, and two ways to light them up. You can either affix a coincell battery on the underside of the form or install LEDs to use with a piece of a clear, conductive material called ITO. By powering up the whole plane with a battery pack and alligator clips, you can play out scenes with your flowers and frogs by arranging them on this clear “pond” to switch them on. This is a great project to do at a workshop or with kids!
Tutorial photos and special assistance creating this project provided by Risa Rose.
k6rtm tweets: “#Adafruit RGB #neopixels with photocell for sensing ambient light levels”
Flora RGB Smart Neo Pixel version 2 – Pack of 4 – What’s a wearable project without LEDs? Our favorite part of the Flora platform is these tiny smart pixels. Designed specifically for wearables, these updated Flora NeoPixels have ultra-cool technology: these ultra-bright LEDs have a constant-current driver cooked right into the LED package! The pixels are chainable – so you only need 1 pin/wire to control as many LEDs as you like. They’re easy to sew, and the chainable design means no crossed threads.
NEW PRODUCT – rePaper – 2.0″ Graphic eInk Development Board – Ever since the Kindle eReader came out, we’ve been wanting a nice small graphical eInk display that is easy to use with a microcontroller. And finally our desires have been fulfilled with the rePaper 2.0″ development board from Pervasive Displays! We’re excited to offer this very interesting display breakout for hackers who want to start playing with small eInk displays.
This kit comes with a driver board that is powered from 3V and has level shifting on all the I/O pins so it can be used with 5V microcontrollers such as the Arduino. The PCB also has a lot of driver circuitry required to keep the display running smoothly such a temperature sensor, FLASH memory and ZIF socket. All signals are broken out to a 20 male socket header on the left. A 20 pin socket/socket cable is included to make wiring easier and there’s also some extra-long header so you can plug these wires into Arduino header or a breadboard.
The display is 2″ diagonal and 200 x 96 resolution true eInk graphical display. These are intended for use as small dynamic signage in grocery stores since a barcode displayed on it can be scanned by a laser barcode-reader. The display does not require any power to keep the image and will stay ‘on’ without any power connection for many days before slowly fading. Of course, it’s also daylight readable and is very high contrast. This makes it excellent for data-logging applications, outdoor displays, or any other ultra-low power usages.
The good news is that rePaper/PDI have provided a suite of example code for Arduino UNO/Leonardo as well as the MSP430 Launchpad and also have a site with some documentation on how to wire up the displays and datasheets. However, please note: the displays are quite large pixel-wise and to dynamically write to the display requires 3K of RAM – more than the Arduino/Launchpad so the current example code only displays what are stored in a 8-pin FLASH chip in the devboard. (By default that FLASH contains a picture of a cat and some imaged text, see photos above) That means that right now we don’t have example code for drawing to the eInk display directly with calls like drawLine() or println(). It’s very likely that using an Arduino Mega or Due a fully buffered dynamic display library could be written but that code doesn’t exist yet (and there is no ETA as to when it might be done). For these reasons, we suggest that this product is for customers who are interested in bleeding edge technology and are comfortable writing and hacking on code!
the french motion/sound graphics company pixelux studio has recently created an interactive and generative installation that thrives on the power of the collective effort. twenty-eight bicycles connected – through a rather complex integrated system of light, sound, and video – to a continuous three-dimensional display around the statue of the venerated king louis XIV interprets the physical work of the cyclists into a visual and audible display in a three-minute stint. the intensity of the light-show is entirely based upon the exertion of the users, with thebicycles’ top speed being rewarded with an all-white maximum-power light and a fireworks display to reward the riders.
NEW PRODUCT – Breadboard-friendly RGB Smart NeoPixel – Pack of 4. This is the easiest way possible to add small, bright RGB pixels to your project. We took the same technology from our Flora NeoPixels and made them breadboard friendly, with two rows of 3 x 0.1″ spaced header on each side for easy soldering, chaining and breadboarding. These ultra-bright LEDs have a constant-current driver cooked right into the LED package! The pixels are chainable – so you only need 1 pin/wire to control as many LEDs as you like.
These pixels have full 24-bit color ability with PWM taken care of by the controller chip. Since the LED is so bright, you need less current/power to get the effects you want. The driver is constant current so its OK if your battery power changes or fluctuates a little.
Each pixel draws as much as 60mA (all three RGB LEDs on for full brightness white). An Arduino can drive up to 500 pixels at 30 FPS (it will run out of RAM after that). Using ribbon cable you can string these up to 6″ apart (after that, you might get power droops and data corruption)
Each order comes with 4 individually controllable pixels. In the photos above we show the pixels with headers soldered on, but the pixels do not come with any headers. You can pick up some in the shop if you need.
NEW PRODUCT – HDMI/VGA/NTSC/PAL Display – 10.1 Diagonal – 1280×800 IPS. Yes, this is an beautiful bright 10.1″ TFT display with incredibly high resolution and great angle-visibility! We tried to get the thinnest, brightest, highest resolution display that would be good for embedded computing usage. The visible display measures 10″ diagonal and is a ‘raw’ display as is used in a tablet, ultra thin with some mounting tabs around the edge. We include a driver board with HDMI, VGA and Composite inputs. The display is very easy to use – simply connect the included 9VDC adapter to the 2.1mm center-positive DC jack, then connect a digital video source to one of the ports. Voila, a display!
There’s a little wired PCB with little buttons that let you enter a menu system for adjusting brightness, color and contrast. It tried to auto-detect which input you have and switches to that one or you can ‘select’ from the menu which to display.
To demonstrate it, we took some photos with the display connected to a Raspberry Pi, but it will also work connected to any device with HDMI, VGA or NTSC/PAL output. It will not work with a device that only outputs DVI or SECAM.
For use with a Raspberry Pi we suggest editing config.txt to set “hdmi_safe=1″ output for best results (otherwise, the Pi may not ‘recognize’ the HDMI display and revert to composite output)
A 9V US-prong power adapter is included. The power supply may vary from the one shown in the photo, but it will definitely have a US 2-prong plug and will be a switching supply that can be used with 110-240VAC. We also powered it with 12V and it worked fine, and it might work at 5V.
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
FEED