I think I found my next electronics build! Behold this awesome mesmerizing light sphere made out of LED's! Nikolai Nikitin created this "Magic Ball" and put all the diagrams and schematics up on his blog, here. His site is originally in Russian but chrome browser/google translate does a good job deciphering it for us non Russian speakers. It's a pretty amazing build, and gorgeous to look at! Check out the video below:
The sphere is just so darn pretty to watch as it cycles through its patterns and sequences. One thing I'd like to try with my version is to make a sphere mold and place the project in the center then fill the mold up with some clear or translucent resin, safe for electronics, and encase the entire, with a seperate resin plug for the on/off and battery changing.
A Palantir !
I think translucent colors, or those colors swirled together, would be the way to go to mute the direct light flashes of the LED's, something akin to the palantir in the Lord of the Rings movies. I suppose you could make or find an acrylic "hamster" like ball and put it in "loose" or secure it rather than go with a full resin fill. Either way this is a great build and the ideas are flowing! Hopefully there is no "Dark Lord" on the other end!
Hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for stopping by!
For those of us with the MSP430 Launchpad Microcontrollers these two products may be of interest and can be found over at olimex.com.
The First is a 8x8 LED board that has connectors for the launchpad as well as other 8x8 Matrix LED boards. These left sided connectors allow you to chain a bunch together to form a scrolling readouts, animations, or other cool projects. You could configure them in alternate ways too with a bit of wiring or some bending, I'm thinking of a cube! Also each board has a buzzer and a microphone! Here are the specs:
Launchpad connectors
LED8x8 brick connector
Microphone
Buzzer
FR-4, 1.5 mm (0,062"), red soldermask, white silkscreen component print
SUPPORTED DEVICES: all devices which can be used on MSP430-Launchpad DIMENSIONS:66x51 mm (2,6x2,0")
The second product is a a Solar Panel Battery Charger. This looks like it is to be used with a 1.2v single battery and will fully charge a 800mAh battery in 10hrs of direct sunlight. So if you're designing a project with a lipo battery you can use this board to charge up your project when your power needs require it affording you have nice sunny days. This could be adapted for many outdoor projects, e.g., low power monitoring station for a mini-greenhouse, lighting for the greenhouse, etc. Here are the specs:
SOLAR PANEL 2.4VDC 80mA with DC/DC voltage boost converter
JTAG connector for direct plug in MSP430 2x7 JTAG connector to provide power for the target board
suitable for up to 800mAh rechargeble battery, 800mAh battery will be charged to 100% if MSP430-SOLAR is left for 10 hours on sun light
Magicker is the "style" of the Ikea Lamp, which I don't even think its available anymore, that I use for my bookcase lamps. The video explains why I did this conversion, which more or less was because these lamps were going through the $5.00 halogen bulbs like there was no tomorrow. I had to replace both lamps bulbs once a month and the last straw was when I had to replace three bulbs in a months time.
I have a suspect that it has something to do with the transformers the lamps used as they always ran very, very HOT and I even had one appear to have shorted out and scorched a power outlet not long after purchasing them! The transformers were just a step down transformer which went from 120V AC to 12V AC. My power in my apartment has never had a brown out or black out, which is surprising living in California, but I suspect that it has something to do likely being on the same power grid as the Hospital I live near.
So needless to say I decided to ditch the AC transformers and use a universal DC transformer, you know the kind that has a bunch of different barrels/connections on the ends for electronic games, and gadgets. This also saved me from having to wire up in my schematic going from AC to DC, which I was going to build my own LED board. Then after a quick fry's electronic store trip I stumbled across these kits from digitron (don't bother looking for them on their site, its not listed yet). The kits were $9.99, a bit pricy i know, but it had everything I wanted. They're super bright have 6 lights with 3 bright white LED's (so technically 18 individual LED's) and could be used for either 12V AC or DC! The cool thing is that if you want you could solder up a bunch together in various configurations and still only run one power source! You see they're designed with solder pads on each corner and once that connection is made power will flow along to all that are connected! NEAT!
Overall it was a fun conversion and i'm pretty happy with the outcome, the transformers no longer run HOT, and the light is a nice bright white which I can vary at a flick of a switch from just a faint glow for movie watching or full on "daylight" for reading.
What I'd like to do in a future hack is add maybe a small controller board and wireless so that I can program a time schedule and turn them on/off wirelessly or some other wacky idea, strobing perhaps!
So if you're interested in seeing my explanation, about 8 mins, and then build process, its in time lapse, take a look at the video!
Hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for stopping by!
