Peace, Love, and LEDs

Inventor · Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 3:16 am Post subject:

Attached please find a proposed layout of the LED peace sign. It has 29 LEDs and there is only room for four LM324's, plus not much room for discretes. I think it can be done, but it may be necessary to go surface mount, dunno.

LayoutPlan.jpg

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The proposed layout

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laura woodswalker · Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 7:12 pm Post subject:

OMG!!!!!!
You guys are talking about LED's!!!!!!!!!!!
That has been my 3rd obsession this year!!!!
(After Keyboard learning and Reason synth writing.)

I taught myself basic soldering and electronics this winter. I got to where I can build an LED lamp out of a crystal Lite container and 4 or 5 rainbow blinking LEDs and a 9V battery.

Now I am kind of stuck because I'm not sure how to expand my power source, plus I'm afraid to try toe more complex timing chip designs 'cause I'm pretty sure they won't work.

but if i had LOTS of free time (i.e. retired) I would love to build a frequency-sensitive LED device that goes with music.

I asked the guys on Electronics 101 forum everything I could. Now that I know there are LED freaks on this forum, I found some new people to ask questions!

RF · Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 7:58 pm Post subject:

Laura!

I sense there is an unrequited DIY junky inside of you Smile

I'm sure we can hook you up with some interesting LED application schematics....

Welcome to the obsession.

bruce

Inventor · Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 8:26 pm Post subject:

Yeah, what bruce said, Laura! For LED fun in a dark room, put a convex lens in front of one of them and watch it project a beam on the ceiling...

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 1:31 pm Post subject:

seraph · Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 2:06 pm Post subject:

it was only a matter of misreading the title Wink

Inventor · Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 9:34 am Post subject:

I'm rethinking the design. There's just not enough room on the board fr four chips and all the passives. Maybe I should simplify the design somehow. Clearly a mic and two stages of an LM324 are needed, but perhaps the rest can be simpler somehow...

iceowl · Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 3:47 pm Post subject:

Just saw this thread - probably 2 months late - and wonder if you guys heard of this "peggy" thing. It was designed by the guys who scared the crap out of Boston a few years ago by planting them all over the city. Someone though they were some sort of terrorism.

Anyway - it seems like a good, ready made platform for such a thing as your mom suggested. You don't have to populate every PCB location with an LED. Though they are only monochromatic at this point, I suspect there's an RGB version soon to come.

I've built a bunch of them, attached various sensors to make the pictures change....one of those time wasting things that we so adore...

Cheers

http://evilmadscience.com/tinykitlist/75-peggy2

Inventor · Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 3:57 pm Post subject:

Thanks, that Peggy 2 board looks very interesting. It's amazing to see all the new technology out there. I don't want to get into Arduino programming at this time however. Also I want to make it reproducible easily so all who want one can have it. And it needs to be round, it will be worn like a pendant on a necklace... But kewl product, thanks again.

Les

laura woodswalker · Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 5:33 pm Post subject:

Inventor · Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 5:47 pm Post subject:

blue hell · Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 5:52 pm Post subject:

Inventor · Posted: Sun Jul 12, 2009 5:06 am Post subject:

This morning I decided to surf the web looking for blinking LEDs for this project and I found some. I also looked at multicolor LEDs. As I was browsing my imagination got loose which is always dangerous, heh, and I thought of another approach to this peace sign.

For the moment let's forget about the voice-activation part of the project and discuss the blinkie part. I have a patent on a thing called a Cooperative Ring Oscillator, which is a ring oscillator generalized to a hexagonal mesh. Having done this work, I believe that one could also create many kinds of such "mesh oscillators" by using inverting logic gates connected in some creative way. OK, so that would make a distributed blinkie thingie which is close to what we want, but what about the LEDs?

Well, since LEDs are diodes and we're talking about using logic gates, how about using DTL, or Diode Transistor Logic? What a blast from the past! So let's see, we create some kind of mesh structure made of perhaps NOR or NAND or XNOR gates implemented in DTL - well, we could call it LEDTL for fun... Then we arrange the LEDs physically into a peace sign but electrically in some sort of mesh.

It would be necessary to add a capacitor to the inside of each gate, perhaps of differing values, and to modulate the frequency in response to the voice somehow, probably just by varying the supply voltage.

Well, just thought I'd post because it seemed like an interesting solution. Comments?

Les