Why Are We Only Just Now Hearing About LED Beaded Curtains

Beaded curtains are a pretty banal piece of home decor, unlikely to excite most interior design enthusiasts. Throw on some addressable LEDs, though, and you’ve got something eye-catching at t…

Wooden CNC Sculpture Displays Conway’s Game Of Life

Conway’s Game of Life has been the object of fascination for computer hobbyists for decades. Watching the generations tick by is mesmerizing to watch, but programming the data structure and i…

A Nifty Tool For Counting Neopixels

Picture it. You’ve got a big roll of NeoPixels, but you have no idea how many are actually on the tape. Or you need to count how many WS2812B LEDs are in a display to properly plan your anima…

PentaBlinky – When One LED Is Not Blinky Enough

[michimartini] over on Hackaday.io loves playing with multivibrator circuits, and has come across a simple example of a ring oscillator. This is a discrete transistor RC-delay design utilizing five…

Got Fireflies? Try Talking To Them With A Green LED

[ChrisMentrek] shares a design for a simple green LED signal light intended for experiments in “talking” to fireflies. The device uses simple components like PVC piping and connectors t…

Enhance VR Immersion By Shoehorning An Ambilight Into A Headset

Everyone wants a wider field of view in their VR headsets, but that’s not an easy nut to crack. [Statonwest] shows there’s a way to get at least some of the immersion benefits with a bi…

A Tale Of Two LÄMPs

Building with LEDs is a hacker pastime like no other – what’s more, if you keep playing with LED tech out there, you’re bound to build something elegant and noteworthy. For today&…

Exploring The Tech Behind Concert LED Wristbands

LED wristbands are now a common feature of large arena concerts and events, with a variety of capabilities and technical implementations. In the video after the break, Wall Street Journal does a fa…

Do-Everything LED Indicator Light Runs From 4V To 60V

If you’re working with 3.3V or 5V circuits, it’s easy for you to throw on a power or status LED here or there. [Tom Gralewicz] has found himself in a pickle, though, often working on pr…

Electronic Earrings Are PCB Art You Can Wear

If there’s one area of the human anatomy we rarely try to draw the eye, it’s the ears. Nonetheless, [DIY GUY Chris] has developed some LED earrings that should do exactly that. The earr…

Light Meets Movement With A Minimum Of Parts

We often say that hardware hacking has never been easier, thanks in large part to low-cost modular components, powerful microcontrollers, and highly capable open source tools. But we can sometimes …

Math You Can Wear: Fibonacci Spiral LED Badge

Fibonacci numbers are seen in the natural structures of various plants, such as the florets in sunflower heads, areoles on cacti stems, and scales in pine cones. [HackerBox] has developed a Fibonac…

Op Amp Contest: This Lighthouse Sculpture Flickers In The Rhythm Of Chaos

Op amps are typically used to build signal processing circuits like amplifiers, integrators and oscillators. Their functionality can be described by mathematical formulas that have a single, well-d…

Moon Phase Lamp Uses Rotating Shade

The Moon has fascinated humanity for centuries. These days, though, it’s a trial and a bore to go outside and stare upwards to check on the natural satellite. Instead, why not bring the Moon …

Hacking The IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD LED Wall Lamp

The IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD is a pixel-style LED wall lamp that comes with a few baked-in animations, and [ph1p] improved it immensely with an ESP32 board and new firmware. The new controller provides all …

Building A Giant Vacuum Tube Smart Lamp

Vacuum tubes are pretty, which is why they’re often showcased externally on exquisitely-expensive home Hi-Fi hardware. But if you just want to gaze at their beauty without making any noise, w…

Clever Optics Make Clock’s Digits Float In Space

If you’ve never heard of Aerial Imaging by Retro-Reflection, or AIRR for short, you’re probably not the only one. It’s a technique developed by researchers at Utsunomiya Universit…

Converting A B&W Exposer Head For Colour Analog Photo Printing

[Koraks tinkers] was gifted a gargantuan photographic enlarger, a Durst Laborator 138 s, which is a unit designed specifically for black and white usage only. This was not good enough for [Koraks] …

Hacking Hue Lightbulbs

What do you do with a Hue smart lightbulb? Well, if you are [Chris Greening], you take it apart and get hacking. If you ever wondered what’s inside, the teardown is pretty good, and you can a…

LED Matrix Displays Get New Look Thanks To SMD Stencils

Even if surface-mount skills aren’t in your repertoire, chances are pretty good that most of us are at least familiar with SMD stencils. These paper-thin laser-cut steel sheets are a handy wa…