Wearable microcontrollers have found their way into cosplay, fashion, and daily wear but are usually textile based. In this Skill Builder we’ll explore techniques for including leather in your wearables by examining my forearm bracer project, which uses a built-in Adafruit Gemma and RGB NeoPixels that change color patterns with a simple capacitive touch of […]
Light Up Leather Arm Braces Read More »
At a Less Than Jake concert I noticed that Vinnie Fiorello’s drums had LED lights inside. They would periodically change colors while the roadie set up the band’s gear, but stayed one solid color during the performance. Less Than Jake have an energetic live show and these static lights just wouldn’t do — I knew
Impact Reactive Snare Drum Lights Read More »
Introduction This tutorial shows how to put together a sound visualizer that I created, during my time in the SparkFun HIR program. The end goal for the project was to have a sound reactive LED belt buckle. To accomplish the task of sound visualization, a Raspberry Pi drives and communicates with a Pixel Board over USB.
Hackers in Residence: The Sound Visualizer Read More »
Introduction This guide is a follow up to the first write up I did for my participation in the SparkFun HIR program. This guide shows how to setup a music visualizer for PCs/laptops. It uses an RGB LED panel to display the music visualization. It plays MP3s and is Java powered. This project differs from the first one
Hackers in Residence: The Sound Visualizer Pt. 2 Read More »
Introduction While designing the layout for the new SparkFun Emporium, I was given the opportunity to design a large LED art installation. I’ve helped build LED installations before, but had never had the opportunity to design one from the ground up. Thus was born the CandyBar, a 46-foot LED bar consisting of 8 meters of addressable LED strips
Building Large LED Installations Read More »
Introduction The Lumenati line of LED boards is designed to give your projects an edge in their lighting capacity. Based on the APA102C addressable LED, these LEDs employ a 2-wire communication protocol consisting of a clock line and a data line. While this requires one more wire than standard WS2812B addressable LEDs, the advantage is that the communication
Lumenati Hookup Guide Read More »
Story This is my 3rd tutorial with a focus on Scratch and Physical Computing. Regarding this topic, I have already published: Physical Computing – Scratch for Arduino, where as the name says, I explored how to use Scratch and Arduino to interact with the physical world. Physical Computing – Scratch for Raspberry Pi, same but
Physical Computing – Scratch 2.0 for Raspberry Pi Read More »
This demonstration features the uLCD-220RD-Pi, a display module pack for the Raspberry Pi. The uLCD-220RD-Pi is made up of a uLCD-220RD 1.38″ round TFT LCD display module, a 4D Serial Pi Adaptor, and a 5 way interface cable, for quick and easy connection to a Raspberry Pi. In this demo the Raspberry Pi acts as
Controlling Widgets using Raspberry Pi Read More »
Hardware components: Nabaztag Not sold anymore, but maybe on Graigslist or eBay? × 1 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B × 1 Google AIY Voice HAT They come as a free gift with The MagPi #57, or you can subscribe to get a notification when they are for sale later on. × 1 SK6812 RGBW LED
Nabaztag Gets a New Life With Google AIY Read More »
Hardware components: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B × 1 Walabot × 1 Unitek USB3.0 4-Port Hub × 1 Power Sonic Model PS-640 F1 6 Volt 4.5 AmpHr Battery Supply × 1 Servo (generic) Personally modified Futaba S3003 for continuous rotation. If using a different brand of servo research the number of spline teeth for your
