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 …

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…

Electronic Connect 4 Console Doesn’t Use LCD

You might think that making your own electronic games would require some kind of LCD, but lately, [Mirko Pavleski] has been making his using inexpensive 8X8 WS2812B LED panels. This lets even a mod…

Bass Reactive LEDs For Your Car

[Stephen Carey] wanted to spruce up his car with sound reactive LEDs but couldn’t quite find the right project online. Instead, he wound up assembling a custom bass reactive LED display using…

Displaying The Time Is Elemental With This Periodic Table Clock

We see a lot of clocks here at Hackaday, so many now that it’s hard to surprise us. After all, there are only so many ways to divide the day into intervals, as well as a finite supply of geek…

Addressable LEDs From A Z80

If you buy WS2812s under the Adafruit NeoPixel brand, you’ll receive the advice that “An 8 MHz processor” is required to drive them. “Challenge Accepted!”, says [Shiel…

Smart LED Curtain Brings Sprites To Your Windows

Anybody who has ever seen a video wall (and who hasn’t?) will be familiar with the idea of making large-scale illuminated images from individual coloured lights. But how many of us have gone …

The Great Resistor Embiggens The Smallest Value

With surface-mount components quickly becoming the norm, even for homebrew hardware, the resistor color-code can sometimes feel a bit old-hat. However, anybody who has ever tried to identify a rand…

Building A Tessellated NeoPixel Clock

Anyone can buy a clock, but building your own lets you express your creative flair along the way. [Edison Science Corner] did just that with this neat sci-fi looking design. The build relies on an …

Your Mug Will Like This Glowy Coaster

[Charlyn] wanted to highlight their friends beautiful mug collection, so the Glowy Coaster was born. The coaster is made up of six layers of laser cut acrylic. The top and bottom layer are cut out …

An Impeccably Documented Word Clock In Dutch

[Maarten Pennings] shares a word clock project – but not the regular kind. For a start, this clock is a shining demonstration of hobbyist-available 3D printing technologies, with embedded lig…

Big LED Matrix Becomes Tiny LED Matrix Thanks To Fiber Optics

Everyone loves LED matrices, and even if you can’t find what you like commercially, it’s pretty easy to make just what you want. Need it big? No problem; just order a big PCB and some W…

Teaching You Everything You Might Have Missed About Addressable LEDs

Often, financial motivation results in people writing great educational material for hackers. Such is absolutely the case with this extensive documentation blog post on addressable LEDs by [DeRun].…

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…

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…

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…

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, …

Parts Shortage Forces Creativity For This Recursive Clock Of Clocks

We’ve been seeing a lot of metaclocks lately — a digital clock whose display is formed by the sweeping hands of an array of individual analog clocks. They can look fantastic, and we&#82…

A Perfect Clock For Any Hacker’s Ohm

The vast majority of us are satisfied with a standard, base ten display for representing time. Fewer of us like to be a bit old-fashioned and use a dial with a couple of hands that indicate the tim…

Jigsaw Puzzle Lights Up With Each Piece

Putting the last piece of a project together and finally finishing it up is a satisfying feeling. When the last piece of a puzzle like that is a literal puzzle, though, it’s even better. [Nad…