Vintage Audio Amp Gets LED Lighting Upgrade

Vintage hi-fi gear can be very attractive, particularly compared to modern stuff. However, when this stuff starts getting into its third or fourth decade after production, things start to wear out.…

Rudolph’s Sleigh On A North Pole PCB

Each Christmas, [Adam Anderson], [Daniel Quach], and [Johan Wheeler] (meanwhile going by ‘the Janky Jingle Crew’)—set themselves the challenge of outdoing their previous creations. Last…

Building A Pi-Powered LED Chess Board

If you live near Central Park or some other local chess hub, you’re likely never short of opponents for a good game. If you find yourself looking for a computer opponent, or you just prefer p…

Classic LED Bubble Displays Ride Again

Hewlett-Packard used to make some pretty cool LED displays, many of which appeared in their iconic pocket calculators back in the 1970s and 1980s. [Upir] tracked down some of these classic bubble d…

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How Purdue Hackers Made A Big Sign That They’re Really Proud Of

Let’s say you’ve got a fun little organization that does things together under a collective branding or banner. Maybe you want to celebrate that fact with some visually appealing signag…

Small Volumetric Lamp Spins At 6000 RPM

Volumetric displays are simply cool. Throw some LEDs together, take advantage of persistence of vision, and you’ve really got something. [Nick Electronics] shows us how its done with his neat…

The 1983 Clock Four Decades In The Making

In 1983, a 14-year-old [Will] saw an LED clock in The Sharper Image store. At $250, it stayed in the store. That was a lot of money back then, especially for most teenagers. But [Will] didn’t…

Fail Of The Week: The Case Of The Curiously Colored Streetlights

What color are the street lights in your town? While an unfortunate few still suffer under one of the awful colors offered by vapor discharge lamps, like the pink or orange of sodium or the greenis…

Witch’s Staff Build Is A Rad Glowing Costume Prop

Let’s say you’re going to a music festival. You could just take water, sunscreen, and a hat. Or, you could take a rad glowing witch’s staff to really draw some eyes and have some …

Blinking An LED Passively

It is a pretty common first project to use an Arduino (or similar) to blink an LED. Which, of course, brings taunts of: you could have used a 555! You can, of course, also use any sort of oscillato…

Train Speed Signaling Adapted For Car

One major flaw of designing societies around cars is the sheer amount of signage that drivers are expected to recognize, read, and react to. It’s a highly complex system that requires constan…

Why Have Seven Segments When You Can Have 21?

IO user [monte] was pointed towards an 1898 display patent issued to a [George Mason] and liked the look of the ‘creepy’ font it defined. The layout used no less than 21 discrete segmen…

Build Yourself A Beautiful Interactive Light Toy

Sometimes, we build things with LEDs as indicator lamps or to illuminate something important. Sometimes, we build things with LEDs purely to glow and be beautiful. This interactive light toy from […

Forget Ship In A Bottle, How About Joule Thief In A Fuse Tube?

We love close-up pictures of intricate work, and [w] hits the spot with a tiny joule thief in a fuse case (social media post, embedded below) powered by an old coin cell from a watch. It’s so…