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.

Actively Cooling a Monitor

My grandfather got a brand spanking new iMac relatively recently and he had given me his old LCD Monitor. The only thing wrong with it was that it would just turn off after a period of time. It wasn’t always the same amount of time and after you power cycled it, it would come back but the picture would flicker.

I expected to be able to just crack it open, spot the problem and move on - that wasn’t the case. Nothing appeared to be wrong. I finally figured that I would follow what my first hunch was, which was thermal issues. As a temporary fix, I duct taped a computer fan to the top of the display and used the tape to force it to intake from the monitor only.

It hasn’t even flickered all day. So I guess it was thermal issues. I might make a more permanent fix in the next few days. I just have to open the display again and locate a source of 5-12 volts that will be able to provide the current I need (a measly 0.12 amps).

More ATTiny13 and LEDs

Ever since I discovered charlieplexing some time ago, I’ve wanted to implement it and I finally have - at least on a small scale. There are six LEDs controlled by three pins on the micro-controller. Since I didn’t really have the board space, I only used those six LEDs, but once I etch the board (or have it fabbed) there will probably be something like 20 LEDs.

Once I get to that many LEDs, I’ll really have to refine my code since as of now it is fairly rudimentary.

At one point I was putting together a rather nifty animation, but due to my rather inefficient code I ran out of memory to finish it. I only have 1K after all. And while yes, I could drop down to assembly to program it - I don’t know assembly; I know C/C++.

The next step for this little gizmo is to design it a board to use, etch it, and get some proper SMD components.

ATTiny13 Light Wheel