This RGB based LED ring is the second version of a project which has three LED driver chips which enhance the brightness of the color lights. I found the second version more appealing than its ancestor when I watched the video. The first version used only one LED driver IC which was less attractive than this one. If you want to give this cool RGB based LED ring a try then you can refer with the whole procedure described below by Robert here.

“As of ’2.0 beta’ (likely to become the final version) it comes with 3 dedicated constant current LED driver chips (MBI5168), which completely avoids multiplexing the LEDs and boosts brightness again. Color balancing is done entirely in hardware using 3 potentiometers. The hardware differences should be taken care of in the core part of the demo code, ‘User-land’ code is mostly the same”.

Thanks to Mike for sending in his German Word Clock. He has used some SPI controlled RGB lighting strips to make wiring and controlling the lights simpler. So that the letters look good he has built and installed an MDF baffle with 100 light holes in it. 

 ”To control the clock, an ATmega8535 is used. This is a real-time clock (DS1307), a Bluetooth module and a Darlington array to control the 4 leds around the clock, each of which represents the minutes (Example: The Time Clock “It’s five after two” and two LEDs lights -> Thus, it is seven to two).

- 40 × 40 cm, so that you can read the clock at a distance greater good

- Mirrored glass front panel or Plexyglas

- “Wooden Shield” of the light cone to prevent unwanted light from letters

- To clean aluminum frame around edges have

- RGB lighting

- Brightness sensor

- Control by smartphone”

 Check out this cool DIY Arduino Oscilloscope which uses a cheap Nokia 3310 Screen which can often be found for $5 or $10. Watch the video below to see how surprisingly good this thing actually works!

 ”The setup is really simple, connect an Arduino Pro Mini to a Nokia 3310 LCD screen, sample an analog port and then wright the pixels to the screen. I even added two potentiometers, one that adds delay to the sample to essentially provide a basic time scale and another pot that can scale down voltages as long as they are below three volts (the operating voltage of the micro controller). Unfortunately if you want to sample sign waves that have voltages over three volts you are out of luck unless you build an electronic circuit to scale it down somehow.”

Who says The Clapper is old technology? Pete Mills blows off the dust from the vintage tech and breaths new life into the idea. The new Clever Clapper uses Claps and Laser Beams to control the Lights!

 ”In my version of the clapper if you clap twice within one second, the circuit toggles the lamp output.  On becomes off and vice versa. If you clap three times within one second, the lamps begin dimming up and down via PWM until a fourth clap is detected or a one minute timeout occurs, whichever comes first.  The brightness value is then stored and restored for subsequent toggling of the lights on/off with the two clap event.  I also added a relay output to turn on and off the moon lamp.  To trigger this relay, you shine a laser beam at the circuit to toggle it.  Laser beams begets moon beams. “

James Burton from XRobots.co.uk has sent in the latest progress on his Bipedal Dynamic Stability Testing. Looks to be moving along very well.

“It’s about half the height of an average person and I built all the parts from scratch with hand tools. It’s basically intended as a development platform so I have some more to build and some more experiments to do, but I’m at the stage where I have dynamically stable walking using R/C style heading gyros intended for use with R/C helicopters. The whole thing is currently controlled with a single Picaxe-18X micro controller.”

If you ever wanted a way to control your night light from across the room you are in luck. Dan reverse engineered his Ikea night light and stuffed in a bunch of electronics so that it can now be controlled by an Android Phone. Of course remote control is just the beginning, a smart Android app could now easily use it to display the status of many things.

“It’s about a simple idea: take a cheap 3 colours Ikea night lamp, hack it by replacing its original MCU and adding a cheap serial bluetooth device and then write a simple Android app to control the lamp remotely from your phone !

This is just the beginning, imagine the possibilities once the phone has direct control over the colours and their respective intensities. You can make it light up in sync with some music, you can make it change colours depending on some e-mails you receive or your Facebook status, etc. …”

 When I was living the cubicle like it sometimes seemed what time either flew by or slowed to a crawl. This Capricious Clock by our friend Pete Mills makes the second hand move in some strange ways which makes it makes the seconds tick by the way time sometimes feels.

 ”The code keeps track of the 1pps pulses coming from the quartz clock movement, it delays for a random period of time then moves the second hand.  If the “Real Time” elapsed is greater than the displayed time the program will delay anywhere from 1-0.125s to catch up to the “Real Time”.  If the display time is faster, the program will select a random time from 1-8s to slow down so that “Real Time” can catch up.”