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[Alex Hornstein] was bored one Saturday and decided to do something with the large pieces of scrap acrylic he had found. He built a cube and attached 15 RGB LED clusters along with 4 GB LED sticks. It takes 50W of power. The controller is built from ATmega48 and is controlled via serial commands over a wireless link from Spark Fun. You can find schematics, pictures, and video on his site, Art is Wrong.
[John Peterson] showed us his Puzzlemation, animated tile puzzle at Maker Faire. It was originally designed for the Microchip 16-bit Embedded Control Design Contest. The puzzle is made from multiple modules each with an 8×8 LED grid. The tiles are battery powered and each one has
natrium42, the original PassMe designer, has released a guide for building a serial interface on the Nintendo DS. It does require you to flash a new firmware on the Passme, but other than that it is just a matter of soldering wires to the RX and TX. He’s tested it with a keyboard, a bluetooth module, and a USB adapter. If you want to hook it to a computer you’ll need the level converter he suggests. There is a lot of potential here.
In other news: StoneCypher has offered a bounty for an open source TCP/IP implementation on the DS; it’s already broken $1100.
[thanks pete]
Here’s an altered PCB that gives USB control to an Ikea Dioder. This is a $50 product that comes with four strips each containing nine RGB LEDs. The stock controller has a color selection wheel and a couple of buttons. [Rikard Lindström] wanted to use it to match ambient light to the colors of his computer monitor — yes, it’s another ambilight clone.
Since he already had a bunch of AT90USB162 chips on hand he chose that route. These chips have native USB support (he’s using the LUFA package which is a popular choice), but no on-board ADC. That means no need for the potentiometer from the original controller because there’s no easy way to read its value. Removing it made plenty of room for his add-on PCB. He also depopulated the PIC microcontroller that originally drove the unit, soldering to the empty pads in order to connect is own board. The finished product fits back in the original case, with the addition of a USB cable as the only visible alteration. Now he can dial in colors using a program he wrote.
In case you’re wondering, it looks like this is a newer version of control circuitry when compared to the original Dioder hack we covered.
Okay, we lied, we totally want one of these too. The CMT 380X Blackbird is one wicked hybrid car!
Looking like it just rolled off the set of the next Batman film, the Blackbird is the brainchild of Electronic Arts Chief Creative Director [Richard Hilleman]. Starting from a kit car base — the Factory Five Racing GTM chassis — [Hilleman] created a unique 230 horsepower drive train combining a 30 kilowatt diesel turbine and 24 KWh lithium polymer battery pack.
As a purely plug-in electric car, the Blackbird has a range of 85 miles. In hybrid mode, range is extended to 500 miles. The car can accelerate from 0 to 60 in about 7 seconds. Come decelerating, the car makes use of regenerative braking.
It’s strictly a one-off for the time being, but several companies have approached [Hilleman] about possibly commercializing the design. A couple more choice pics follow the break…
