It’s The Simple Things

I love minimal hacks. Limitations are sometimes the spark for our greatest creativity, and seeing someone do something truly marvelous with the simplest of technological ingredients never fails to …

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…

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 …

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 …

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…

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…

Quick And Dirty Microscope Motion Control For Focus Stacking

If you’ve spent much time looking through a microscope, you know that their narrow depth of field can be a bit challenging to deal with. Most microscopes are designed to only have a very thin…

The Curved Nature Of Time Clock

While we’re told that space-time curves, we aren’t sure that was what [andrei.erdei] was going for when he built a great-looking curved LED clock. The LEDs are courtesy of a strip of 84…

Illuminate Your Benched Things With This Death Stranding Lamp

[Pinkman] creates a smart RGB table lamp based off of the “Odradek device” robot arm from the video game “Death Stranding”. [Pinkman] adds a XIAO BLE nRF52840 Sense device, …

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…

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…

A Cold Light To Warm Your Heart

Halloween is coming fast and what better way to add to your Halloween ornamentation than [Wagiminator]’s cute NeoCandle tea light simulator. [Wagiminator] has modified a 3D printed ghost alon…

The Sensory Bridge Is Your Path To A Desktop Rave

[Lixie Labs] are no strangers to creating many projects with LEDs or other displays. Now they’ve created a low latency music visualizer, called the Sensory Bridge, that creates gorgeous light…

Throwback: Designing Addressable LEDs From Scratch

These days, addressable LEDs are all the rage. A little chip paired with each LED receives signals and modulates the light output as needed. [John Peterson] was working on a project along these ver…

LED Flower Bouquet Is A Radiant Hacker Desk Decoration

[Jeremy Cook] writes to us about a project of his – a bouquet of LED cube flowers. The flowers are PCB cubes made out of small castellated PCBs, each of those having an individually addressab…

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].…

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.…

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…

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, …

Art Project Fast And Fouriously Transforms Audio Into Eye Candy

Fast Fourier Transforms. Spectrum Analyzers. Waterfall displays. Not long ago, such terms were reserved for high end test gear. But oh, how things have changed! It’s no surprise to many Hacka…