LED
DIY Decorative Lighting with LED Sea Urchins
Want a totally new and bizarre way to create home decor? Stick an LED light inside of a sea urchin shell! Taking a break from our typical hacking projects, here’s a dirt simple, fast way to create unique decorations. Using colored LEDs connected to small lithium coin cells , you can create the diffused lighting effects inside the tiny sea urchin shells.
Color Changing EL Wire Hour Glass
This EL wire (electroluminescent) hour glass is actually a fairly simple build. It’s built around a three foot long tube with two wooden rounds attached at either end. Then, a motor is added to one end to spin the EL wire around the tube to create the hour glass illusion. Attaching EL wire (can be picked up fairly cheap on eBay ) in five colors around the wood round and the pipe is the final finishing touch.
DIY Night Vision Monacle with IR LEDs
Using cheap Infrared LEDs and a cheap camera, you can build this handheld night vision monacle. Start with a viewfinder from an old camcorder, add some IR LEDs, and that’s the basis of this simple project. You can also setup the night vision viewer as an ultra-low light video surveillance system too. 10 infrared LEDs are typically enough to light up the target area. With the right filter lens, the target area could be a room or your entire backyard.
Learn how to spice up your boring staircase with interactive LEDs to illuminate each step. As the video above demonstrates, the LED lights switch on one at a time when a person begins their journey up or down the stairs. The lights get deactivated as they progress. The project is part of Interactive Furniture’s channel on YouTube.
DIY Interactive LED Stair Lighting
DIY Fiber Optic Fabric using RGB LEDs
By weaving fiber optic strands as if they were yarn, this team of DIYers created a fiber optic “fabric” of sorts which features a few dozen RGB LEDs and reacts to the outside world via Twitter. Currently, they’re raising funds to launch a company to produce the textiles , but we’re posting it here so you can be inspired to build your own. After the strands are weaved together, groups of the strands are grouped together and aimed down the head of an LED. Each LED is controlled via software which also connects to the web. The electronics behind it are fairly simple and can be easily replicated using an Arduino . Popular LED and Light Projects:
Let’s face it, LEDs are the reason most of us got into electronics in the first place . This superb project uses one blue, red, and green LED and spins them on three different axes. A complex project with stunning rave-like results guaranteed to educe seizures.
Superb 3-Axis Ball of LEDs
How to Display Audio as Light, LEDs to Music
We’ve got three tutorials to help you learn how to convert audio signals to LED light. One tutorial lights the frosted edges of plexiglass. Another uses signals directly from a sound card.
The warm ambient glow of the LED Cube’s fantastic display of illuminated animation and hours of programming. They’re actually easier to create than you may think. We’ll show you how in plain English using simple designs and multiplexing
Tutorial: How to Make LED Cubes
Here’s an outstanding, yet simple custom lighting project you can build yourself. Using some basic lighting fixtures filled with colored mineral oil to create the custom glow effects. The authors also used a pump and PVC hose to create a lava lamp bubbling effect to spice up the lighting. Imagine how fantastic this would look in this Mac-tacular Lair . Learn how to build your own custom lighting through the full tutorial. See all of our LED and Laser projects . <p style="text-align:right;color:#A8A8A8"></p>
Outstanding RGB Liquid Mood Lamps