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Hoop skirt — made with real hoops!
Eleanor and I spent this weekend working on her Halloween costume. Part of what she planned was a ‘hoop skirt’, but as you can imagine no commercially available hoop skirt met her exacting standards...
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Optimizing 10 lines of Arduino code: You’re wrong, so am I.
I’m going to show you a simple ten-line Arduino function, and how through surprisingly confused experimentation I was finally able to make it 40% smaller and nearly twice as fast. Along the way, you’ll...
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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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Running 2 Amps of LEDs through an Arduino Nano
The Arduino Nano provides up to 0.5 Amps of regulated +5v output, on it’s “+5V” pin, which can drive between 10-30 addressable LEDs, depending on your chosen brightness and animation patterns. Even if...
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If I’m confused, it must be playtime.
Some things we try because we have a clear idea where we want to be and a clear idea how to get there. Some things we try because we’re suddenly shocked to find that the heretofore completely...
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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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Easter Egg Hunt Rules, 2014.
We love doing Easter egg hunts. But as the girls get faster, smarter, and more wily, merely finding the eggs is no longer challenge enough. I’ve gotta slow ’em down somehow, and this is how I do it:...
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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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Iteration impels improvement.
This thing that I am casually holding up in one hand is an 7′ x 3′ LED tapestry, plus diffuser, plus controller box, plus all mounting hardware, plus power supply and extension cord (rolled up inside...
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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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Easter Egg Hunt 2016.
We’ve always loved Easter egg hunts, but with the girls getting smarter, faster, and more wily every year, we’ve had to make the hunt more… challenging. Our previous Easter egg hunt had infuriatingly...
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#68: Clearway, For Inventing CDN
Bear with me here, because about 200 words from now I’m going to make a huge brag that I hardly ever talk about these days. OK, thanks. Let’s go: In January 2001, “Web Hosting Magazine” published their...
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Easter Egg Hunt 2017
Oh, we love our Easter Egg hunts. Oh, we love our Easter Egg hunts. As the girls (now age 14) have grown from little kids, to tweens, to actual teenagers, what started as a simple find-the-hidden-eggs...
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82°
This is a 100% recycled yak fur story. Molly asked me a thoughtful question while I was in the middle of something else and I said “Just a second, I need to rotate my brain.” A moment later, I said...
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Harbinger of… autocomplete
According to Merriam-Webster, a harbinger is “something that foreshadows a future event, something that gives an anticipatory sign of what is to come.” So, now what’s the first phrase that comes to...
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Giving the Gift of Receiving
When you’re a little kid, the proverb “It is better to give than to receive” sounds like nonsense grown-up talk; most little kids would rather get a toy than give one away. But here’s a story about...
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