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Glowing bubbles?! Yes! …but no.
The other day I was in the store and my attention was caught by “Super Miracle Bubbles® GLOW FUSION™ Bubble Solution” — bubble soap that claimed that it made bubbles that glowed. These were not...
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Rejuvenating solar garden lights — with nail polish!
Solar LED garden lights are everywhere these days, and by ‘everywhere’ I mean ‘in our yard.’ We’ve had some for a few years now, and simply through exposure to the elements, the plastic that covers...
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Small Scale Solar power presentation
I gave a “learning lunch” presentation on Small Scale Solar power today. We had a great audience, got great questions, and had fun doing it — despite the definite lack of sunshine to play with today....
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“Five Elements” light sculpture
After months of work, “Five Elements”, my first full light sculpture debuted this weekend at a private event. This quick video shows a short clip of each ‘element’; the actual five-element cycle is 12...
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The Lightning Tree: Halloween
Over this past summer, I built “The Lightning Tree” — a 13-foot-tall steel and aluminum tree covered in hundreds of programmable LEDs. Normally, The Lightning Tree slowly cycles through animations...
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“Firelight” Lantern
This past January (2013), I created “Firelight”, a lantern that shines with the light of a simulated fire. The lantern contains over a hundred LEDs, a microcontroller, a battery pack, and custom...
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What Dark, Light, and Solstice mean to an LED art hacker
We celebrated the winter solstice last night with friends and laughter. I wore a little pin with a circle of LEDs on it, animating a cycle of light and dark. I think that for lightbenders (LED art...
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Fire2012: an open source fire simulation for Arduino and LEDs
I’ve built and programmed a couple of different ‘fire’ simulations for Arduino and LEDs, and I’ve had numerous requests over the years to share the source code. I’ve always been happy to share my...
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Lanyard-mountable LED throwies
At the last “HacKidThon”, we showed a passel of kids how to make LED “throwies”. Each one is a nothing more than an LED, a coin cell battery, and a magnet so the contraption can stick to metal...
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FastLED for the Apple II: Hack to the Future!
These days, I hack LEDs. I’m the co-author (with Daniel Garcia) of the FastLED library for driving tons of high speed LED pixels and strips using microcontrollers like Arduino and Teensy. But back in...
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Cautionary Tales of Power
When doing an LED electronics project, there seem to be three big “P”s that have to be tackled: 1. Pixels (which ones, how many, what configuration?), 2. Programming (what do I want, and how can I do...
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First light – five years later
Five years ago today I got my very first piece of LED art gear to light up for the very first time. It was a Color Kinetics panel that you sent data to over ethernet, not an addressable LED strip &...
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