The Simple Tech Behind Hidden Camera Detectors

If you’ve ever been concerned about privacy in a rental space or hotel room, you might have considered trying one of the many “spy camera detectors” sold online. In the video afte…

1D Fireworks Are Nice And Quiet

Maybe you do it out of respect for the dogs and parents of young children in the neighborhood. Or maybe you do it because they’re harmful to the environment, or just because it’s too da…

An Animated LED Fireplace Powered By The CH32V003

Once you’ve mastered the near-magical ability of turning your ideas into a piece of hardware you can hold in your hand, it’s only natural that you’ll want to spread the joy. The h…

DIY Tube Lights Look Amazing For Just $50 A Piece

It’s the future. We should have weird glowy lights everywhere, all over our homes, cars, and businesses. In the automotive world, luxury automakers are doing their part with LED ambient light…

The Dark Side Of Hacking XMas Lights, Literally

When looking at the piles of cheap RGB, Bluetooth-controlled LED strips you can find for sale just about anywhere these days, integrating them into a home-automation setup is very tempting. Normall…

Add Some Blinkenlights To Your Supercon Badge

We’re not sure what is more amazing here: the glow of the blinkenlights themselves, the tedium involved in creating it, or the fact that [makeTVee] soldered 280 microscopic WS2812 LEDs while …

LED Ring Brings The Bling

We’ve seen our share of light-up jewelry over the years, but for some reason — probably power — it’s almost always earrings or necklaces. So when we saw [ROBO HUB]’s L…

Build Your Own Nanoleaf-Like Hex Lights

Nanoleaf makes a variety of beautiful LED lighting products, with their hexagon tiles particularly popular with gamers and streamers alike. However, they do come at a significant cost, particularly…

How The WS2812 Is Made

[Scotty Allen] of Strange Parts is no stranger to Chinese factory tours, but this one is now our favorite. He visits the font of all WS2812s, World Semi, and takes a good look at the machines that …

Fixing Astronomy In The Blink Of An Eye

If you’ve ever set a telescope up in your backyard, you probably learned how quick any kind of lighting ruins your observation. In fact, a recent study found that every year, about 10% of the…

Taking A Public Transit Display From Project To Product

We’ve noticed an uptick in “project to product” stories lately, which seems like a fantastic trend to us. It means that hackers are turning out projects that really resonate with …

Neopixels? Try Liquid Nitrogen To Color Shift Your LEDs Instead

If you’re like us, you’ve never spent a second thinking about what happens when you dunk an ordinary LED into liquid nitrogen. That’s too bad because as it turns out, the results …

Pimp The Potentiometer

Sometimes, a hack isn’t really about the technology but about the logistics. If we asked you to light up an LED using an Arduino, there’s a good chance you’d know exactly how to d…

3D-Printed LED Wall Clock Does Lots With Little

This wall clock built by [Alf Müller] is lovely, using two NeoPixel rings to mark the time by casting light onto a 3D-printed ring. The blue shows the minutes, made more discrete by a grid inside t…

A Tiny Board For Driving LEDs In…Whatever

Whether you’re into chiptune or just playing Tetris on original hardware, you might like rocking a heavily-customized Game Boy. Lovely flashing LEDs can only improve the aesthetic, so if that…

Giant LED Matrix Fills Blank Space In The Kitchen

We’ve all got one: a blank space somewhere in our home that we don’t know what to do with. [James Miller] had one above his kitchen cabinets, so he filled it with a giant LED matrix. Th…

Time And Tide Are One Thing

The rise of 3D printing has given us incredible things, from awesome tchotchkes to intricate chocolates to useful things like spare body parts. But none has been so vital to comedy as say, printing…

Printed Upgrades Improve Cheap Digital Microscope

Digital microscopes used to be something that only labs or universities might have, but as image sensor technology has progressed, the prices have fallen to the point that any classroom or hobbyist…

Backyard LED Sculpture Inspired By Las Vegas Sphere

The Las Vegas Sphere is a large building. It stands 112 meters high and 157 meters wide, and is covered in a full 54,000 square meters of LED displays. That’s a little difficult to recreate a…

Minimalist LED Lamp Is Circular Beauty Incarnate

Lamps used to be things built to provide light with specific purpose, whether as reading lamps, desk lamps, or bedside table lamps. Now we just build them for the vibes, as with this minimalist LED…