Most of us have seen the car alarm “blinky” light through a vehicle’s window. However, a fake light is easy to differentiate from the real thing in the way it operates. The fake LED would blink constantly, while the “real thing” would blink only once every few seconds. Here’s a circuit to make the fake more realistic.
While brainstorming project ideas for our microcontroller class at Cornell University, we realized that we all particularly missed visiting amusement parks during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, we decided to build something that would bring some of the excitement of those parks into the lab. In particular, we thought that using LEDs on a LED strip would be a creative and exciting way to visually simulate different rides.
Light up your living space with a customizable motion-activated nightlight. Use this as a working product in your home to safely light your way in the dark, or as an educational project for your children or grandchildren.
This article describes the theory, construction, and final project functionality of a musical circular harp that utilizes an off-the-shelf concert organ which provides 160 possible instrument sounds and full MIDI capability. Plus, it looks really neat.
Want to “paint with light?” This article explains in detail how you can build a low cost (<$100) microprocessor-controlled LED light saber that provides as much or more capabilities than professional light wands.
When you plan to create a large sign with LED dot-matrix modules, the circuits and software can seem like a big challenge. However, the step-by-step approach in this tutorial gives you what you need to know to make a sign of your own.
Driving LEDs using the lowest possible pin-count is a common challenge for folks creating projects with microcontrollers. Complementary LED drive, also known as “Charlieplexing”, allows a large number of LEDs to be controlled with a relatively small number of I/O pins. This fun digital LED clock project is a hands-on example of how Charlieplexing can be used to stretch your “pin budget”!
