Tinkerlog

A couple of months ago, some nice guys of the IFISC (Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems) contacted me. They saw the Synchronizing Fireflies and wanted them to demonstrate how simple rules can make patterns emerge from chaos. The main research of the institute is in Nonlinear Physics and Complex Systems.

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It’s Advent season. And what do you do to let your geek shine? An LED Advent wreath of course.

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Niklas did an amazing job, letting fireflies play some tunes. It’s almost as if they are alive.
Niklas, I owe you a beer (or Club-Mate or whatever), should we ever met. You made my day!

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Last week I invested some time to solder 64 Firefly boards. Only 2.432 solder joints later I was ready for some videos.
Every firefly acts completely autonomously, it has its own tiny controller, eye and luminary. They are all connected for power supply only.

Here are some different configurations.

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In this post I will try to show, why it’s a good idea to use a current limiting resistor for an LED. And when it’s save to drive the LED without any resistor.
If you read about LEDs, you will notice that everyone tells you, that you need a current limiting resistor. But mostly they do [...]

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I love Blinkenlights. And all kinds of other blinking and flashing LED stuff. I think, it’s already a form of addiction. When I ran across an LED matrix with square pixels, I thought it would be cool to build a small animated display with it. To keep things simple, the display is attached directly to [...]

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Lately I was playing with my dual color LED matrix from Sparkfun. It is a matrix of 8 by 8 dual color (red and green) LEDs that measures 5 cm by 5 cm. I just had some sprites flickering across the matrix as the magnifying glass of my “third hand” came in the way. I [...]

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Update 04. Dec. 2008: This article is replaced by the new howto.
This is a remake of the fireflies which I did a year ago. I was always fascinated by the emergence of patterns. One I like most is the synchronization of hundreds or thousands of fireflies. First they flash randomly but after some time and [...]

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This is a new version of my Tengu clone. This time on a printed circuit board (PCB). I have them produced by Olimex and I am very pleased with the quality. The PCB worked on the first try and has some minor issues only.

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BlinkM is a smart LED, developed by Tod E. Kurt from ThingM. In a way it is a cousin of the Programmable LED. It is a microcontroller with an attached RGB LED. The idea is to implement PWM to control the color and brightness of the LED and put it in the controller. That means [...]

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