I have lost my way in the world of software and its now time to brush the dust off my interest in building hardware
The Timed LED Lighting Control project has been driving the LEDs in our stairwell since 2017. The system is based on two modules. A custom built LED driver, which has been running faultlessly, and a Raspberry Pi + Django based user interface. This year the user interface module died. In this post, I describe the … Continue reading Upgrading the Stairwell Foot-lighting Project
At the local open workshop ZAM, there came a project idea for a text display that is publicly available. After some experimentation with a commercially available unit - that proved to be too cumbersome for public use, we explored creating our own. In this post I describe how I adapted my original NeoPixel driver project … Continue reading Converting the NeoPixel Driver into a Text Display
The local open lab sent out a call for ideas to run workshops over the lead up to Christmas. I thought of a Christmas tree with candlelight LEDs. I needed to know what was involved in making such a model before I could conduct a workshop. In this post I describe the that approach that … Continue reading Getting Started on Christmas Workshop Idea
In a previous post I explored a technique to connect a chain of LEDs in parallel and enable the LEDs to blink alternatively in a series of animations using an H-Bridge. Since the H-Bridge is used extensively in motor controllers, in this post I take the experiment one level further and use an integrated motor … Continue reading Using a Motor Controller to Drive a LED Chain
I became interested in a LED display I saw in a beer garden over Summer. The remarkable thing was that it was clearly LEDs on a bus of only two wires. Even so the LEDs were able to be animated such that they could blink in unison or every other alternatively. I was intrigued as … Continue reading Bidirectional LED Driver
I have looked into using Neo-pixels strips and I was really impressed with the simplicity of use. Now I was curious about controlling a matrix of individual, non-addressable RGB LEDs. So I searched out a LED Matrix driver that looked like it could handle RGB LEDs. My search ended with the IS31FL3736 12×8 DOTS MATRIX … Continue reading RGB LED Controller
Playing with some animations of the single LEDs strip of my NeoPixel board was nice but the thoughts soon come to mind: “It would look better if there were more strips”, “…if there were more strips, how could they be coordinated”, to “Could I still use the ATiny1614?”. To take this project further, I considered … Continue reading Expanding the NeoPixel Project
Rebooting Electronics 