Lightsaber Lighthemin

From JardineroUrbano on Instructables via our G+ Community, Makers, hackers, artists & engineers:

I’ve had a hardcore affinity for LEDs of all sorts. It began with a journey to make my own grow lights and evolved into so much more than I expected. Since than, I have experimented with many of the usual LED wearable forms such as a sound reactive tie, an LED Belt, and several iterations of LED goggles; All to run around and confuse the living daylights out of people. But now my neurons have decided to create a crazy mashup. I think of it as a light theremin, thus the name of Lighthemin.

Now I will be the first to admit I am only controlling LEDs with a fun piece of kit by SpikenzieLabs called “The Rainbow Lightshow.” That piece of kit has 3 IR sensors employed as distance sensors. Which allows me to “play” light as kind of an instrument. So no sounds are being generated by my build. I am only attempting to “move” the lights to the music as best as I can. My orignal idea was to attempt to tie in a DAW studio driven by an Raspberry PI to produce sound as well as control the LEDs. But I noticed this contest less than 20 days ago. So naturally I had to scale back to try and meet the deadline. ((Which I almost didnt…))

But now to on to the build!

This isn’t a high amperage project. But if you are just getting started with electronics it wouldn’t hurt to look over the basics, mainly so that you do not incur any damage to yourself. Most you will end up doing on a project such as this is burn out some LEDs. I used to keep a count, but than gave up not long after. Meaning that you too will burn out many LEDs. Which is perfectly normal as it is part of the learning process. There is a small chance you might explode the battery in use by being careless. But that would have to be a pretty catastrophic incident.

Read more and see more from Pedro Julian Arroyo on YouTube


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1 Comment

  1. Pedro J. Arroyo

    The one day I didn’t check one of my favorite blogs, happens to be the day I made the front page. Doh! Haha Thanks so much for the link love! I had a great time building this and I plan on making more improvements on the next iteration. Wish me luck!

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