Community Corner: Fiber-Optic Horsehead Nebula Portrait, Hell Bunny, LED Strip Clocks, and Other Treats to Round Out the End of the Year in Adafruit’s Community!


Featured Adafruit Community Project

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Steven Burke shared: “The horse head nebula I painted- acrylic on canvas, 1123 fibre optic stars that twinkle and change colour, and 22 larger led stars that twinkle all controlled by a Arduino board! 🙂 ” (read more)

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 71,207 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!


Last Week’s Edition of Adafruit’s Electronics Show and Tell!

SHOW AND TELL 12/28/2013 LIVE (video)


From the Google+ Community

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Ian Henehan shared: “Got my six year old daughter interested in stop motion animation. The story and casting was all hers. I just helped keep the wheels on the project.” (read more)


Jeremy Cook shared: “Quadcopter Sparkler Light Graffiti: Add a moving light in front of your lens when taking a long exposure shot, and you get a ‘light graffiti’ or ‘light painting effect’. Not satisfied with ‘normal’ techniques, I tried a photo this using a quadcopter as shown in this post. As fun as it was, adding fire to it in the form of a lit sparkler produced even more amazing effects.” (read more)


william foster shared: “little project i’m working on: controling an RC car using a keyboard” (read more)


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Robert Harmon shared: “I’ve invented and made many things over the course of my life but I’m most pleased with my current project which is an electronic patient safety sensor. It’s my second medical device invention but will be the first one to make it through the entire arduous process from concept to market!” (read more)


Justin Shaw Google Work in progress Dash an indoor cycle trainer displaying

Justin Shaw shared: “Work in progress: Dash, an indoor cycle trainer displaying real time heart rate, speed, and cadence. It also show heart rate history against your planned workout. The fuel gauge displays how many more heart beats you have planned to the end of the workout. Thanks to Adafruit Industries , +Justin Cooper for the BBB GPIO library. It worked beautifully.” (read more)


Omar EL KADMIRI shared: “Solar energy is one of the most promising and fast growing source of renewable energy. This essential technology aims to replace costly finite fossil fuel consumption by converting free, natural sunlight into clean, renewable electric power. Many innovative research studies are conducted in this field using advanced measurement and analysis technology to decrease the cost per watt, increase adoption, improve yield, and try also to expand the market through innovative applications. In this same perspective, we present a new acquisition module for optimal photovoltaic panels automatic orientation. …” (read more)


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Stephen Becker shared: “My hacking project for the night: update my beer fermentation temperature controller. I think the last time I picture of this thing it was just a boarduino (+Arduino clone) with thermocouple and red 7 segment display to read out temperature. Now I’m driving a 20×4 lcd screen using an I2C I/O expander chip (MCP23017), the thermocouple amplifier is using hardware SPI (instead of the +Adafruit Industries bit-banged implementation), and I’ve added a CC3000 wifi breakout board that I’m intending to use to transmit temperature readings to +Xively for real-time graphs of my fermentation temperatures.” (read more)


Jason Birch shared: “Raspberry Pi Handheld, Battery Powered Digital Camera, Camcorder and Time Lapse: A handheld camera and video recorder made from a Raspberry Pi micro computer, Raspberry Pi camera, 3.5″ composite monitor and 6xAA battery holder. Can record video and take photos in full HD 1080. Also includes facility to capture time lapse images unattended. The monitor will automatically power off to save battery power, without effecting a recording in progress.” (read more)


Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog

Jack Minardi shared his Github activity dashboard tool that provides visual updates for what is happening in his company’s code ecosystem: “The goal of this project was to display real time activity from my companies Github feed. I used an RGB LED matrix to display information about the last 30 events, including the username of whoever is responsible for the most recent event. I am sending it your way because I used Adafruit’s awesome NeoMatrix arduino library to control the display.” (read more)


Hell Bunny Project on the Adafruit Forums! “I’m working on my final project for physical computing class. I have an ugly stuffed animal and am trying to convert it into the “Hell Rabbit”. When someone enters the room, my rabbit will scream or produce other scary sounds, with the eyes (two red LEDs) blinking and ears sweeping in different directions (using two TowerPro SG90 micro servos). I’m using a PIR motion sensor to activate Wave Shield….” (read more)


Bruce Hall created a handy Trinket audio project demo and tutorial – Trinket Tone Generator: “‘Prelude in C’ from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One, by J. S. Bach. Add music to your Trinket! Tutorial & Code have been posted to w8bh.net here.” (read more)


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Tim Bartlett shared his LED Strip Clock built around a Teensy and a 1-meter 60-NeoPixel LED strip: “I just put together a clock with Adafruit’s 60-NeoPixel LED strip, running off a Teensy 3.0 microcontroller. The flexible 1-meter strip has 60 RGB lights, so different colors represent the second, minute, and hour — you can read it like a normal clock if it’s in a circle, but you can also leave it in a straight line or drape it over something for the Salvador Dalí look…” (read more)


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Twitter user superkittens has made a hilarious and fun cat themed Christmas sweater using our FLORA and some neopixels. (read more)


YouTube user gwa0800 took our Firewalker project to a whole new level and made it festive to boot (no pun intended)! “We made some mods to the code, supplied by Bill from Support, to make it more Xmas like.” (read more)


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Ed Dawson has published documentation describing his “experiences building a custom coloured LED light that works as a visual light alarm clock, powered by the Raspberry Pi computer” (read more)


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