lighting

TritiLED Flashes for 20 Years on a Single Coin Cell

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From  on Tindie blog:

tritiled

TritiLED Flashes for 20 Years on a Single Coin Cell

Ted Yapo had a small problem. As an amateur atronomer and astrophotographer, he needed a way to mark his expensive equipment so that he wouldn’t trip over it in the dark. Glow-in-the-dark materials were out because of they only glow for a short time, and glow sticks were also less than ideal because of their single-use nature. Tritium light sources would be perfect, barring the small details that they’re radioactive, expensive, and in the US only a few uses are allowed, most are prohibited by law.

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So Yapo instead came up with an LED light that can run for not 20 hours, or even 20 days, but 20 yearson a single CR2032 coin cell battery!

TritiLED Flashes for 20 Years on a Single Coin Cell

Trixel Interactive LED Kit

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Arkadi designed this interactive LED kit:

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Trixel LED

Create your own interactive Light elements by soldering basic shapes, such as triangle, square, pentagon and hexagon to create an interactive LED sculpture.

Here’s a video of the Trixel LED boards in action:

The design files are available on GitHub:

arkadiraf/Trixel-LED

 

Arkadi_Raf has shared the boards on OSH Park:

Pentagon LED

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Order from OSH Park

Square LED

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Order from OSH Park

Triangle LED

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Order from OSH Park

Trixel Interactive LED Kit

Brake Lamp Flasher for Motorcycle

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Bryan Cockfield of Hackaday writes:

Brake Light Blinker Does It with Three Fives

Sometimes you use a Raspberry Pi when you really could have gotten by with an Arudino. Sometimes you use an Arduino when maybe an ATtiny45 would have been better. And sometimes, like [Bill]’s motorcycle tail light project, you use exactly the right tool for the job: a 555 timer.

boardsMore details on William F. Dudley’s project page:

Brake Lamp Flasher for Motorcycle

The 555 is a clever chip; not only will it supply the oscillator for the flashing effect, it has a reset pin that can be used to force the output to a known state (low) when (other circuitry tells it that) it’s time to stop flashing. Thus the brake light will be steady “on” after a few flashes every time the brake is applied.

brake_blinker_1_schem

The 555 is happy to run directly off the nominal 12 volt vehicle electrical system, so no voltage regulator is needed. The 555 is almost immune to electrical system noise, so no worries about your Arduino code going off into the weeds if there’s a spike from the electrical system.

 

Brake Lamp Flasher for Motorcycle

Trailer Brake Light Controller

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Kevin H. Patterson designed this solution for trailer light wiring after installing a towing hitch on his vehicle:

Custom Brake Light Controller Expands your Trailer’s Capabilities

This is a power module designed to control trailer lights based on signals from your vehicle’s lighting circuits. Most vehicles have at least 4 separate circuits: Running (Tail) Lights, Brake, Left Turn, and Right Turn. Most basic trailers have a 4-wire connector with only 3 signals: Running (Tail) Lights, Left Turn, and Right Turn. The trailer does not have a separate circuit for Brake lights; applying the Brake is supposed to light up both the Left and Right Turn signals together.

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The board can be purchased on Tindie:

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Creltek 3-Line Trailer Light Converter

4-Line to 3-Line Combining Tail Light Power Module for 12V Systems

 
Trailer Brake Light Controller

RGB LED Panel Controller using MSP432

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John Boyd created simple controller for RGB LED panels with the Texas Instruments MSP432 ARM microcontroller:

Screenshot from 2016-07-09 05-26-30

MSP432 RGB LED Panel Controller

I have managed to get it working without issue at 60 FPS [..] I think I could push to above 100 FPS.

 

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The challenging part of this project was designing the firmware in a way to leverage all of the MSP432 peripherals to reduce the computational requirements for the CPU.

The hardware design files and firmware source code are hosted on GitHub:

 MSP432-RGB-LED-Panel-Controller

Screenshot from 2016-07-09 05-33-53

RGB LED Panel Controller using MSP432