Levitating With Light

The University of Pennsylvania has a team that did a little light research. Well, not light in the usual sense of that phrase. They used very strong light to levitate Mylar disks in a vacuum chambe…

A Ball Lens For Optical Fiber Coupling On The Cheap

It’s fair to say that for most of us, using a fiber optic cable for digital audio or maybe networking will involve the use of an off-the-shelf termination. We snap the cable into the receptac…

Weird Phosphor Conversion LEDs Found In Cheap LED String

[Tim] recently found himself tinkering with a cheap string of LEDs. Far from an advanced, IC-controlled addressable set, these were merely a string with LEDs of four colors that could be switched o…

Backpack Board For OLEDs Boasts Fancy Features

Back when LCD character displays based on the HD44780 controller were the bee’s knees, a way to make them easier to work with came in the form of “backpack” PCBs, which provided a…

This ESP32 Pico Wristwatch Has Plenty Of Potential

Prolific hacker [Sulfuroid] is a medical doctor by day, and an electronics hobbyist by night, and quite how he finds the time, we have no idea. The project we want to highlight is an ESP32 based LE…

Tutorial Teaches You To Use Neopixels With Micropython

Addressable LEDs are wonderful things, with products like Neopixels making it easy to create all kinds of vibrant, blinking glowables. However, for those without a lot of electronics experience, us…

DIY Nanoleaf LED Panels Offer Peace Of Mind

Nanoleaf light panels are a popular product for creating glowing geometric designs on walls. However, for those that like to avoid IoT devices that integrate with big cloud services, they’re …

Keep Track Of Your Google Calendar With This Custom Build

Keeping track of your appointments on Google Calendar is easy enough if you’re holding a phone or sitting at a computer, but sometimes you just want to know what’s going on at a glance.…

Reverse-Engineering A Two-Wire LED Strip Protocol

Although Christmas may be several weeks behind us, various colorful LED contraptions can nowadays be found in our houses at any time of year. [Tim] got his hands on an LED curtain that came with a …

Remoticon 2021 // Debra Ansell Connects PCB In Ways You Didn’t Expect

“LEDs improve everything.” Words to live by. Most everything that Debra Ansell of [GeekMomProjects] makes is bright, bold, and blinky. But if you’re looking for a simple string of…

Improving An Already Phenomenal Star Trek Prop

When Star Trek: Voyager was in the development phase, concept art was created for a new style of tricorder to be used by the crew of the titular starship. But as it often the case with a younger si…

Slither: A Visual Pedometer That Sheds Light

Have you already broken that New Year’s resolution to get more exercise? Yeah, us too. Maybe the problem is simply that we didn’t gamify the goal. A simple visual aid that shows your pr…

Tiny LED Matrix Panels Tile Together Perfectly

There’s a lot to admire about LED matrix projects, which more often than not end up looking really cool. But most of them rely on RGB matrix panels sourced from the surplus market, and while …

Modular Design Enables Huge Ping-Pong Ball LED Displays

Ping-pong balls have many uses: apart from playing table tennis, they have been used for countless art projects, science experiments, and even to raise ships from the bottom of the ocean. As it tur…

Need A Small, Cheap Ammeter? Blinkenlights To The Rescue!

You know how it is. You’ve got that new project running, and while it doesn’t consume much power, it also doesn’t give much indication of whether it’s functioning or just si…

NeoPixel Punk Console Drives WS2812s Using 555 Timers

NeoPixels, a type of LED strip with individually addressable pixels, are a firm favorite among creators of intricate light effects. They are popular for their versatility and the ease with which yo…

Enter The Matrix With This Custom PC Side Panel

With a new Matrix movie out now, it’s hardly a surprise that we’re starting to see more and more projects centered around the franchise’s iconic “Digital Rain” effect.…

Turing Ring Is Compact

One of the problems with a classic Turing machine is the tape must be infinitely long. [Mark’s] Turing Ring still doesn’t have an infinite tape, but it does make it circular to save spa…

Custom Christmas Light Controller Blocks Blinks

Finding that his recently purchased LED Christmas lights defaulted to an annoying blinking pattern that took a ridiculous seven button presses to disable each time they were powered up, [Matthew Mi…

WS2182s On A 6502

We can still remember when the WS2812 LED first came into ourconsciousness, way back in the mists of time. The timing diagrams in the datasheet-of-questionable-veracity made it sound quite tricky, …