[beshur]’s 2-year-old is obsessed with transportation, so he lifted a few DUPLO blocks from the bin and made this toy traffic light as a birthday present. Hey, might as well get him used to the realities of traffic, right? It also makes for a good early hacker lesson: why buy something when you can make it yourself? The traffic pattern is determined by an Arduino Nano V3 situated inside the carved-out rear ...

In the second project in my pick to light, I am using WIFI to pass the data between PC and Arduino. Things used in this project Hardware components Arduino MKR1000 × 1 LED (generic) × 2 Jumper wires (generic) × 1 SparkFun Pushbutton switch 12mm × 1 Resistor 10k ohm × 1 Resistor 330 ohm × 4 Breadboard (generic) × 1 USB-A to Micro-USB Cable × 1 General Purpose Transistor NPN × 1 Story This is the second proje ...

A tech Christmas decoration, created by means of Neopixel LEDs and controlled via an Arduino Micro board, that takes up a minimal amount of space. With the Xmas holidays approaching, we always try to propose a solution or another, one that is capable of combining tradition and innovation, so to avoid the usual or the trivial – even if always welcome – gadget, that is used as a Christmas decoration: and they ...

The objective of our final project was to build a 5x5x5 RGB LED cube that can display a certain color depending on the frequency of music playing. There are two main components of this project. [gallery columns="2" size="medium" ids="31240,31241"] The first part is the hardware setup that consists of the LED cube and the circuits that drive the power for each LED which is controlled through an Arduino Uno m ...

Smart Phone Controlled Arduino Mood Light with Alarm I recently purchased the Neo Pixel LED strip and was quite impressed by the way it works. The tiny LED’s have an inbuilt driver IC which helps us to control each LED individually and can produce a wide spectrum of colors. Being a garish person who is obsessed with colours I really loved watching these tiny LED’s changing colors so I decided to build somet ...

Researchers have developed the first standard LED covering the full visible light, in collaboration with Nichia Corporation. LED and OLED lighting, which is generally called solid-state lighting (SSL), is becoming more common as the next generation lighting. Evaluations of total luminous flux (a performance index for lighting) and color are important for SSL, and to evaluate those values, it is indispensabl ...

Update: Looks like somebody had this idea before me and made a product out of it. Just Google Fake TV. In fact, you can also buy a clone of this from AliExpress – again, just search for ‘fake tv’ in AliExpress. The Chinese versions can be had for about $12 in your hand and that includes a power supply (no doubt of somewhat dubious quality and safety standards). So what follows is a fun project, but it’s eas ...

A couple of months ago I picked up cheap WiFi-controlled LED bulbs (one among dozens of very similar devices), after seeing them at a friend’s place.  This turned out to be an excuse to play with the ESP8266, which has inspired several hacks. I was overall very happy with these bulbs: decent Android and iOS apps and, compared to fancier solutions (e.g., Philips Hue or Belkin WeMo), they do not require any p ...

In the pursuit of ever-shrinking circuitry for nanotechnology electronics, increasingly smaller devices and components are being developed. Now researchers at the University of Konstanz and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) in Germany claim to have micro-miniaturized the humble electrical switch all the way down to molecule size and proven its operation for the very first time. Unable to flick ...

The VL6180X is the latest product based on ST’s patented FlightSense™technology. This is a ground-breaking technology allowing absolute distance to be measured independent of target reflectance. Instead of estimating the distance by measuring the amount of light reflected back from the object (which is significantly influenced by color and surface), the VL6180X precisely measures the time the light takes to ...

Every year I notice that I have little issue waking up at 7am during summer months, yet waking up at 8am during winter is always unpleasant. Some quick research led me to find that the body is gradually woken up by light, which is why products such as the Phillips Wake-Up Light exist. However, with  a starting price of £60 for the (very) basic version, I've opted to make my own smartphone-connected, automat ...

In this Arduino UNO tutorial, we are going to use a Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) to create a simple childrens bedroom nightlight which turns on automatically when it gets dark and turns off when it gets light. An LDR's resistance changes depending upon the amount of light hitting the sensor.  For the LDR we are going to use the resistance reduces as the light falling on the device increases. Used in ...