Stress Relief..

So I had a long day, and as I was cleaning my office I found some LED’s that were less than optimal. I’m not usually destructive, but it was time to blow them up. I love how the LED’s physically move as they die, so cool. The picture below is the last LED that smoked (click for full size), it was a trooper, lots of smoke. Outtakes at the end of the video.

Solar Temperature Badge

Adafruit now carries Solar Badges! It’s like free outdoor 5V batteries forever! I picked up a few of these and have been toying around what I’m going to do with them. They pump out 5V at 40mA for all of your portable power needs. The other huge plus about these is that the cell is a 2″ round badge that comes with a pin. This makes your power supply wearable to show the world your project!  As described in the video above, this badge measures temperature, displays a color scale from red to blue, and flashes digits, displayed as numbered pulses for the temperature. It also has a RGB ‘rainbow’ mode for bling as well as constant color changing temperature display. It was a fun little project and you can pick up the Solar BadgePerma-Proto Boards, TMP36 Temp Sensor, Tilt Switch, Push Button, RGB LED, and even the ATmega328 at Adafruit. Continue reading

RGBW LED Controller

Control your blinky!

Hi everyone, I am happy to announce that I have completed my RGBW LED controller kit and it is now for sale! This kit is a LED controller that features an embedded ATmega328 with an Arduino bootloader for easy programming, 4 channel LED control with dimming, 5 or 12 volt output, IR receiver, XBee header, RS-232 or TTL serial I/O, 2 push buttons, 12 pin extensions for all unused pins (6 analog and 6 digital), and power and channel LED indicators. You can control 5 or 12 volt LED’s via serial with adjustments to the level of any channel with ramping to the desired level, rate of ramping, color cycle start and stop, rate of color cycle, length of stay on each color during cycle. Fans and motors can also be driven with ease. You can buy one for only $35 with the Paypal link below! Be sure and also visit the complete assembly tutorial! Power supplies, RGB and white LED stripsFTDI Friend or FTDI Cable and XBee’s and XBee adapters are available at Adafruit!

Version 2.2 is shipping! Please go to the assembly page for details.

Automation Intro

I wanted to give a tour/crash course on automation systems, so I put together a video showing some of what an automation system can do. I ran through everything kind of fast, so I will do more videos getting into more details on specific functions of sub systems, like lighting, audio, security, etc. This video also shows my RGBW Controller working in my house. 🙂

The system I have is an HAI Omni Pro II. I have been installing automation systems since 2005, and they have proven to be an awesome choice.

For a future project, I would like to replace the Omni with a BeagleBone. 🙂