Category Archives: Light
Articles involving light
Reverse Engineering a 1.5 inch Photoframe
Whilst browsing around a local electronics store I noticed they were selling little key-ring photo frames. These little devices had a 1.5 inch 128×128 colour TFT as well as USB, batteries and 16 Mbytes of storage for around 140 pictures. Best of all they were very cheap, so I purchased a few to see if […]
RGB LED Love Heart
This project creates a RGB LED lit love heart which is controlled by a PIC12F683 microcontroller. I designed the project as a gift for my wife on our 15th wedding anniversary (since she puts up with my addiction to electronics I thought she deserved something in return!). The love heart is made from a 200x150x6mm […]
MicroSimon
This project shows how to create an MB Electronics Simon game clone using an 8-pin PIC12F683 microcontroller. The game includes a full emulation of the original Simon ‘game 1’ and the ability to select from 4 skill levels which control the number of colours you must repeat in a sequence in order to win the […]
USB RGB LED VU Meter
This project creates a RGB LED VU Meter which is controlled via USB by a Windows 7 or Vista host machine. The project serves several purposes: Firstly, it demonstrates how to read audio information from the Windows machine and pass this over USB to the device (which is a question which popped up several times […]
Rotary Encoder Demonstration
Rotary encoders are very versatile input devices for microcontroller projects, not only do they provide 360 degrees of rotational freedom they also allow digital positioning information to be gained without the use of analogue to digital converters (ADCs). When using rotational encoders in projects it’s possible to use the same encoder to represent a number […]
Controlling LED brightness using PWM
Pulse Width Modulation or PWM is a term you hear a lot if you are interested in controlling power output using a microcontroller. It has many applications, although one of the most popular amongst hobbyists is controlling the brightness of LEDs. In this tutorial we will cover the basic principles behind PWM and how it […]
UltimateSIMON
UltimateSIMON is a project which takes a broken MB Electronics SIMON game and replaces the original PCB with a completely custom PIC18F2550 based board with improved sound, lights and the ability to be programmed and customised. There’s even a USB header, in case you want to make the project even more crazy. There are a […]
RGB Luxeon Star Mood Light
The Luxeon Star RGB Mood Lamp requires a 9V DC power supply with at least 1500mA. The connection to the lamp is a 2.1mm DC jack which should be centre positive. The jack should be inserted into the lamp and the lamp assembled before plugging the power supply into the mains socket. The light can […]
LED Colour Organ
I’ve always been interested in sound-to-light conversion since both playing music and electronics are both hobbies of mine, so I decided it would be great to build a ‘colour organ’ of some sort. Much surfing and googling later revealed that there didn’t seem to be any pre-existing designs available on the web that suited my […]
16×8 LED Matrix Display
The 16×8 LED Matrix clock was a project I built for my office. I wanted to have a clock for my desk which was a little unusual. I decided to build a 16×8 red LED matrix display and then interface this with a PIC18F2550 based circuit including a real-time clock and a temperature sensor. The […]