Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - Edge-Lit Holiday Cards. Make your own edge-lit holiday cards using LEDs, plastic, paper, electrical tape, batteries, a pen, scissors, and a hobby knife.
We begin with a piece of clear plastic roughly 1/16″ (1.6 mm) thick, approximately 2.5 x 3″ (65 x 75 mm). We used acrylic, but you can also use polycarbonate, polypropylene, or a number of other clear plastics. You can cut a piece out of a thick-walled clear plastic container or get material like this at the hardware or hobby store. This clear acrylic came with protective blue film on both sides. The initial sheet that we had was about 12″ square, and it turns out that this particular material *cannot* be cut with scissors– it cracks and shatters. Trace the size of your plastic piece onto a sheet of paper. Make a drawing of what you’ll want on your card front; it should fit well within the inner rectangle on your paper. Obviously, how cool your shape looks will influence how cool the final product looks.
And here is the design scratched into the plastic. Framed Color Changing LED Art. This backlit framed LED Art piece displays an abstract, shifting pattern of colored light on a translucent screen.
The projected image has a fluid-like quality; sort of like a solid-state lava lamp. The color-changing LEDs slowly cycle through combinations of red, green, and blue light, which interact to create endlessly evolving patterns. In low light, it casts a cool, eerie glow on its surroundings. Here's a video of it in action. They're tricky to capture video of (particularly when using a cheap digital camera), but it gives you a rough idea: This is an incredibly simple project to put together, thanks largely to the LEDs: I use RGB LEDs with color-changing circuitry built right into the package.
No soldering is required, just some crimping and a bit of hot glue. The parts are easy to obtain online, but I also offer kits through Make Magazine's online store, the MakerShed, for $15: Controllable RGB LED system for your home or office. All good RGB LED systems start with a bit of planning and forethought.
This step is crucial in determining your engineering requirements for the system, such as power supply size and number of control channels, as well as how much the system will cost. And don't forget the artistic intent - planning will help you visualize the look of the system and how it will interact with your space. 1. First thing to figure out is the area where you want to add the LED lighting. You need to visualize where the LED system will be mounted and you should consider the LEDs, the controller(s), the power supply and related cables. Our living room system was built in between our Ikea book cases. 2. You will need to consider the size of each "pixel" in the system. Each system we designed had different depths and different translucent material to project on. Our living room LED system used 32 pieces of the 10cm RGB LED Ribbon, 16 in each column. 3. Make a Joule Thief - Instructables - DIY, How To, science, offbe. Dark Lights LED - Instructables - DIY, How To, offbeat, art.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - "Peggy," A Light Emi. With all the cool things that you can do with LEDs today, there is still one thing that’s lacking: simplicity.
If you want to run a bunch of LEDs at a time, you usually end up spending a fair bit of time worrying about series and parallel combinations, matching brightness, and picking load resistors. Or, if you’re a beginner, maybe you only get one third of the way through the previous sentence– wondering if you’re already in over your head. Suppose that you want to make a big LED display for your window or wall: maybe it’s your logo, a symbol, your favorite 8-bit character, or maybe even a sign that spells out words like “OPEN” or “ON AIR.” How do you go about it? The usual DIY solution involves drilling holes in a panel to fit your LEDs, then spending a heck of a lot of time wiring everything up– ending up with one resistor per LED (and a three-dimensional mess if you happen to look at the back side of the panel).
So how does it work? Circuit theory Microcontroller How do you make it? 1.