Have a look at the Propeller Microcontroller based Floor Lamp that Jason Dorie has put together. His CNC machine was instrumental in the build since the board that you see was routed on the CNC machine with the trace isolation method, this is where a copper clad board has the material around the traces and pads routed away. It uses about 24 watts at full brightness and Jason says that it is brighter than a 100 watt incandescent light bulb.

“For physical construction, the shade is made of a 4′ x 2′ sheet of thin HDPE, the ends are garbage cans from Target, the central column is 1″ PVC from Home Depot, and the “caps” are custom routed 1/2″ UHMW plastic. The LED driver is written in PASM using BrillDea’s SPIN driver as a starting point. The driver is unique in that it’s the first I’ve seen in PASM, and it properly handshakes between the cog running the PWM clock and the cog doing data transmission. This avoids the single frame flicker that happens if you latch in new data during the PWM cycle. I haven’t timed it, but the GS cog should run roughly 1500fps & 80MHz (4096 ticks, 3 instructions each), and the data update cog about 10x faster (~10 instructions per bit, 192 bits).”

This is a cool looking Bubble Display Project. Who doesn’t want to play an instrument that is connected to bubble making system! I think there would be a lot more piano players out there if this was hooked up to pianos in schools.

“The board was built to support up to 64 outputs. Each output had an LED. It was a simple design of several I/O expanders on an I2C bus. Each I/O expander output was connected to a darlington transistor array (ULN2803A IC) The bus would be driven using an Arduino microcontroller. The board was designed and built with millisecond timing resolution in mind. The Arduino wasn’t able to drive the I2C bus fast enough for 50 microsecond timing resolution on the outputs that we later required.”