Category: Solo projects

Handmade diamond nanoleaf replica

Gorgeous wall art, 3D printed, soothing animations, soothing color palette, handmade paper. Created using software that lets the user control the lighting with a high degree of control. 3D printed frames and bezels harmonize with handmade paper

Tech:

  • WLED [https://kno.wled.ge/]
  • ESP8266
  • WEMOS Lolin D1 mini [https://www.wemos.cc/en/latest/d1/d1_mini.html]
  • WS2812 strip LEDs
  • Can be powered from USB power brick or AC adapter.

The build:

  • Printed leafs scaled to 90% to fit on my revived LulzBot mini. Scaled in x and y but not z because LED strip still had to fit.
  • Hand wired led strips. Around 75 solder connections.
  • Built support circuit for D1 mini and cabled to power supply.
  • Cut and glued paper diffusers for leaves.

Future additions:

Codebase supports MQTT control of the lighting so make remote buttons or other controls to change different presets or effects.

Schematic:

Wireless Sensor Network

Goal

To quickly and simply create a wireless data collection system using inexpensive, off the shelf parts.

Use case

I use the network for collecting temperature data from each floor and outside in addition to atmospheric pressure and sky brightness.

Design flow

  • Each pressure, temperature, or light sensor wired to an ESP8266.
  • ESP8266 processors talk to an MQTT broker running on a Raspberry Pi via WiFi.
  • NodeRed server receives data from MQTT broker via WiFi and displays on a graph served on a webpage by NodeRed.

Example output

Code

github [ https://github.com/upliftingtech/enviro-sensor-network ]

LED animated scarf

Powered by an Arduino Pro mini and individually addressable LEDs, this animated scarf runs for hours off a small lithium rechargeable battery and charges from a USB port.

Intro

We were traveling to Austin, TX for a regional Burning Man festival and wanted to make flashy LED wearables to impress our friends. Furry material diffuses the LEDs nicely and the flexible LED strip has held up to a fair amount of abuse. I programmed the animations and built the hardware. Marissa made the scarves.

Code

My github.

The animation engine is somewhat sophisticated. It is able to have multiple animations playing at once so they can move through each other adding together like waves when superimposed. FastLED then handles displaying each frame on the strip.

Hardware

  • SparkFun Arduino Pro Mini
  • individually addressable LED strip – expecting 5v for data and power but 3.3v to 3.7v from the LiPo battery seems to work fine
  • lithium polymer (LiPo) battery 3.7v nominal, 4.1v max
  • LiPo charger takes 5v USB input

Schematic

Scarf video higher quality Download

LED Retro Lamp

I did a quick Christmas present for my brother. He found this old lamp and I converted it to LED with a micro-controller to do PWM dimming.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe underside. Control knob at right is read by the Arduino Pro mini at left. Transistor at top of circuit board forms a constant current source with current set by large rectangular resistors and is switched on and off to do PWM by the Arduino.

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