I am a big fan of LEDs. Bright, colorful, flashing LEDs. So, given my affinity for LEDs, I decided to work on a controller that me and a few of my friends could use as an art project/passive information display. I have posted videos from the first prototypes (here and here), but it has been tough to dedicate time to further development given my research, so I thought I would post the information so that anyone can take the design and modify it to their liking!
I’ve been working on a project in my spare time with two friends to create some ambient light controllers, so I thought I’d just post two short videos to demonstrate the current state of the project. In the current iteration, they can be used as wall-washers or they can be enclosed to create ambient light cubes/spheres/pentagonal cupolas/rhombo-hexagonal dodecahedrons/etc. Each module is addressable and uses a PIC16F628 to control each of the RGB LEDs (which were purchased from the eBay seller jeledhk with the description “Superflux RGB 5mm R/H LEDLamp 8Kmcd COMMON CATHODE”). The PCBs were created using BatchPCB.com for $5 each (+ ~$15 total for S&H and setup) and are beautifully etched, drilled, and silkscreened (although it took about 1.5 months to receive them). Ok, less talk, more videos; one video on the front page and another after the jump:
It has been a long time since I’ve done any microcontroller work, so I decided to get back into the swing of things when 2 of my friends and I decided on collaborating on an interactive “art” piece. Details are forthcoming, but in the meantime, a photo and a video of one of the LED components (video after the break):
I’ve updated my Resume webpage with a citation for a poster I presented on pilot work that I conducted at Rutgers University with Dr. Manish Singh and presented at this year’s Fall Cognitive Festival at Rutgers University:
Cholewiak, S.A., & Singh, M. (2008, September). Representation of variance in perceptual attributes. Poster session presented at the 1st Annual Rutgers Fall Cognitive Festival, New Brunswick, NJ.
I’ve updated my Resume webpage with a citation for another poster I presented on work that I conducted with Dr. Tan and presented at this year’s Perceptual Science Forum at Rutgers University:
Cholewiak, S.A., & Tan, H.Z. (2008, May). Haptic identification and information transfer of stiffness and force magnitude. Poster session presented at the 2nd Annual Rutgers Perceptual Science Forum, New Brunswick, NJ.
I recently purchased an iPhone and have wanted software that not only gave location information, like Erica Sadun’s wonderful findme software (or my, ahem, GPS projects), and sent phone information, like Fuel’s great WeeGee anti-theft package, but combined the tools into a more robust tracking utility. In other words, I wanted both location and information tracking in my iPhone. So, I set about combining the utilities into a script that will send location updates periodically to twitter and will email me with call history, SMS history, web history, location, and pictures if it is stolen. Cool!
I know it’s been a looooong time since I’ve posted any new electronics projects, but that’s primarily been due to my increased course load now that I’m in graduate school. Well, I’ve finally picked up some 1050 ma constant current driver boards for the Luxeon K2 LEDs that I mentioned a while ago and hopefully I’ll get these up and running in just a little bit. I just wanted to post some pictures because I think they’re nice little boards.
Ok, so my last post was a little premature. I was able to modify the source code to get Connection Cloud back up and running! If you use Facebook, I always appreciate individuals trying out my applications (such as Connection Cloud) and giving me feedback.
A snapshot of my social network on Facebook. Red circles are girls, Blue circles are boys, and Black circles are undefined (i.e., the individual’s privacy settings disallow 3rd party information acquisition)
Unfortunately, there was a code change over at Facebook and my Connection Cloud application was broken. It was causing errors left and right, so I disabled it so that I could try to debug the problem (hence why it is no-longer accessible). I have had so much work as a first year graduate student that I have been unable to focus on the Connection Cloud application and fix it. Hopefully I will have some time this winter break to look at the code (along with focusing on other prior commitments); however, I cannot guarantee that I will have the free time to get it fully debugged and working in the short-term.
