The arduino USB Power Shield has moved over to a relay design, to eliminate the voltage drop the transistors would have caused. Ports has dropped to two because a) no one needs to control four 5V devices, and b) the relays are latching and need two pins each. The board isn’t done – I’ve ordered [...]
I really wanted there to be a complete solution for the Woot-Off lights project that could be almost plug and play for the end user, so today I drew up a schematic and a board for a USB Power Shield for the Arduino. It pops onto the Arduino like any other shield, and by controlling [...]
The Woot-Off Lights project continues to slowly progress. Over the weekend we moved over to Python for the coding, since that’s the language Alex is most familiar with right now (especially in networking). Serial control of the lights in Python took longer than expected – we could have saved over an hour of troubleshooting had [...]
In my quest to try out everything the Arduino can possibly do, I decided to hook up a buzzer and try messing around with generating some tones. Since my little 8ohm buzzer seemed to have gone missing, I substituted one of Sparkfun’s audio jack breakout boards and a cheap pair of earbuds I had lying [...]
Here’s some details about the hardware setup for the woot-off lights. It’s exactly as I described in the first post – this just includes the schematic and goes a little more in depth. Let’s take it from left to right. USB input to the Arduino to send serial data. The current from the USB port [...]
After a few hours of clumsy and inept coding, I managed to scrape together a basic windows console application to send data over serial. Right now it just asks you which COM port the Arduino is on (usually COM3), and then you hit enter to turn the lights on/off. All that’s actually happening is the [...]
Want to make an LED yourself? All you need is some Silicon Carbide, a sharp piece of metal, and a 12V power supply (and maybe a couple resistors to limit current). You can see the faint glow at the tip of the needle touching the SiC. Via HackADay
Please see the WootOff Lights Project category for the most up-to-date posts about this project. Occasionally, Woot has extravaganzas where they post item after item in what is known as a woot-off. Little .gif lights spin round and round to alert visitors to this spectacle. Playing on this, Woot occasionally sells physical woot-off lights. They [...]
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