Cylon Blinkenlights

Last night at the Robot House we had a costume party and while I don’t really celebrate Halloween, it was a party and my friends were there so I figured - why not?

Of course, I couldn’t just show up as my usual self, you know? I had to do something at least a little bit awesome. I got the idea about a week ago of embedding a Larson Scanner aka Cylon Lights aka Knight Rider lights, into a hat and wearing it. I spent about 2-2.5 hours soldering, programming, and glueing it and I am fairly satisfied with the results.

I may put up the schematics, but it is an absurdly simple design. Just solder a bunch of LEDs together!

I got a lot of people to stop and say “wow, that’s cool!” and more than one person informed me that someone was targeting me with some sort of laser scope. I think I got a pretty good reaction and not bad for my first real public display of some electronics project. People seem to like blinkenlights.

There are some pictures of the party, but not too many, between the strobe light and the fog machine, my iPhone camera wasn’t doing much good.

10:56 AM | Tags: , ,