Featured Adafruit Community Project
Glen Akins shared this impressive RGB LED matrix project:
I expanded the RGB LED matrix project from a single 32×32 panel to six panels to form a 24″ by 16″ matrix of 96 by 64 LEDs. That’s 6,144 RGB LEDs or 18,432 individual LED chips. The entire matrix has 12-bit color and a 200Hz refresh rate.
The video demonstrates seamlessly looping 3D Perlin noise, an audio spectrum analyzer, a generic falling blocks video game, still images, animated GIFs, and a short video clip all running on the BeagleBone Black and being displayed on the 96×64 RGB LED matrix.
After the demonstration, I turn the panel around and walk through some of the significant parts of the mechanical construction and electronics.
Complete details on the project including links to the source code and mechanical design can be found on this page of my blog…. (read more)
There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 79,278 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!
This Week’s Edition of Adafruit’s Electronics Show and Tell!
From the Google+ Community
(Note: Google+ login required.)
cynthia shared: “My experiment of LED studded bracelet without soldering” (read more)
Matthew W shared his latest light show — give this guy a massive Disney fountain show or something, he’s really creating fun projects! “I just completed the first show on the 5th version of my Arduino Light Show project! Enjoy! To see previous shows, check out the project webpage.” (read more)
Chris Mellor shared: “Quick and dirty macro lens mount. The lens is held in the rubber bush. The tape holds the plate to the back of the tablet. Using your fingers you can star the lens a little. Try it and you will see what I mean. Also this way has introduced vignetting but I’m not to concerned about that. Free in Instagram effect. One thing to point out, there were some sharp sticky out bits on the plate. Get your Dremel out and use it.” (read more)
jose becerra shared: “Scanning a detail of a Euro coin using a BF20 and LinuxCNC.” (read more)
william foster shared: “make magazine did a article a while back about how to make a knock detecting draw . so all i did was change the code a little. and wire it up. yay!” (read more)
Alex McNair shared: “Had a pair of scissors fail – handle ripped through for some reason. I could just buy new scissors BUT NO! Break out the epoxy, build a mold, set the bare tip of the scissor handle, pour dyed epoxy, allow to dry, break away mold, sand and grind to near perfection. Now I’m out several hours and a fair bit of epoxy, but The Man at the scissors store ain’t getting over on me. The Epoxy Man is, but that’s different. ” (read more)
Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog
Adam Haile wrote in to share about his Dial-A-Song project: “Much of the inspiration came from They Might Be Giants, who used to leave recordings of their songs on their answering machine, which could be listened to by calling (718) 387-6962. So, I wanted to combine a little of that with a phone tree menu to give the feel of calling in to a phone service to listen to music of your choice. Yes, it’s a little ridiculous, but why else would I be building it. As a way of documenting the project and an extra push to keep working on it, I’m going to be writing up a build log in several parts as the build progresses….” (read more)
Giles Booth shared a Scratch-a-Sketch Scratch project he created for use with the MaKey-MaKey: “First, draw some arrows and buttons for ‘pen up/down’, ‘colour change’, ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’ in a very soft pencil on some paper. Draw tracks and wire up the arrows to the cursor keys on the Makey Makey. Pen up/down goes to the spacebar, colour change is S, bigger is W and smaller goes to key A. If you don’t have a Makey Makey, you can still use keys on your computer’s keyboard. The code for Scratch-a-Sketch is here – you can play online in the Flash version if you like, you don’t even need Scratch installed. Unlike a traditional Etch-a-Sketch, you can lift the pen up to move around without drawing, change colour and pen size, and combine keys such as 2 arrow keys to draw decent diagonal lines.” (read more)
slurry bowl shared a gorgeous multi-NeoPixel-Ring projection project on the Adafruit Forums. (read more)
Last week, Kevin Osborn showed off the NovaBooth – Open Source Photobooth, and used it to snap a photobooth selfie and email it automatically (along with his contact details!) to Adafruit Support to request an “As seen on Show and Tell” sticker! “…we (the Wyolum Gang) created a photobooth for the Open Hardware Summit, for the purpose of customizing the e-paper badges we made for the conference attendees. This processed the pictures into a small black and white image for the e-paper badge, and saved it onto the badge’s micro-sd card. I was headed to help out at the Northern Virginia Maker Faire, and thought it would be fun to update the photobooth to take full color pictures, upload them to the Internet and offer to email them to friends and relatives. The email message and logo files are easy to add and customize. For basic construction, visit the original post, but download the new software here on github….” (read more)
Drew Fustini shared: “I thought it would be interesting to plot the readings from a sensor over time on the matrix with different colors representing the magnitude of the reading….” (read more)
NeoPixel rings on a little quacopter! Thanks Bitcraze! (read more)
richa1 in the Adafruit forums writes: “This is a variant of the Adafruit Chameleon Scarf that I recently made. I made the color fade and randomly twinkle rather than stay on all the time. I also added a button to restart the color sample sequence as well. To include some motion feedback, I used a Fast Vibration Sensor Switch to increase the number of pixels that go bright when it is triggered. This is using 20 NeoPixles and the wires between them are rather long so that they can be spread out over a larger aria. The color sensor and button are also at the end of a long wire so that they could be placed inside of a fabric sheathe for easy color sampling. This is the same with the last NeoPixle in the chain so you can see the other puffball blink before the color is sampled.” (read more)
@alissadesigns tweeted this vine of her sparkly tank top made with neopixels! Love it! (read more)
Community Corner! Sharing and celebrating the creative community: Show and tell, Ask an Engineer, mailbag, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers. Sharing, learning and celebrating making!