building a remotely controlled flashlight:
For another attraction held during a Halloween party already mentioned in episode #025, I also built a flashlight which can be remotely controlled.
This is ideal to put the participants in complete darkness and have glowing clowns chase them.
For this I added a tiny micro-controller and IR receiver in off-the-selves flashlights, and used a camera shutter remote control.
We will see how to deal with the size constraints using parametric search.
For more details about the Halloween party and infra-red theory, watch episode #025.
building a remote controlled strobe light:
For an attraction held during a Halloween party, I built a device which allows to send strobes of light.
Combined with a ghost apparition, this was the ideal setup for a scare jump.
The strobe controller uses an LED flood light, a solid state relay, and an infrared remote control.
We will see what mechanical and solid state relays are, how to operate them, how infrared remote controls work, and how receive decode their signal.
The Halloween party is called Balloween. It take place in Paris, and is mainly French. An entrance fee is required, but it barely covers the cost of the consumables. I and all the staff helped in our free time and at our own expenses, but it is a lot of fun and nothing beats scaring innocent victims ;).
P.S.: To create light strobes a stroboscope might be the more appropriate, but I did not have one at the time I built this device. I am also not sure how I would control the couple of kV required to fire the flash tube. Flood lights are more ubiquitous, and can also be switched on continuously.
use LEDs on a wall to show time progress:
The LED clock is an add-on for round wall clocks. The purpose is to have LEDs on the circumference of the clock to show the progress of the time using coloured light.
For that you will need:
a WS2812b RGB LEDs strip (long enough to go around the clock)
a development board with a STM32F103 micro-controller and 32.768 kHz oscillator for the Real Time Clock (such as the blue pill)
a coin cell battery to keep the RTC running (optional)
a GL5528 photo-resistor to adjust the LED brightness (optional)
building an ambient light for the screen:
The CuVoodoo ScreenLight mimics the Philips ambient lighting. The idea is to have LEDs on the back of the screen, lighting on the sides the same color as the border on the screen, creating an ambient light.
To implement this I used: VLC (with the AtmoLight video filter) or boblight (way better) to output over serial the colors to be shown on the LEDs; an Atmel ATmega328P microcontroller at 16 MHz (i.e. Arduino Nano 3.0) to control the LEDs and show the values received over serial; a strips of WS2812B chained LEDs (i.e. BlinkyTape), individually controlled using a data line.
LED strip based light installation:
Using LED strips, an ATX power supply, and a custom board I created a nice and bright light installation for my room.
