I flew back home today and immediately started rigging the ball (click here for the article about the ball) drop system for tonight. Here's the pole right after I set it up:

And here's the ball run up to the top and ready to rock:

The pole is made of two 10-foot pieces of 3/4" EMT and is guyed with nylon twine. A couple of pulleys let me raise and lower the ball on more twine. It will run through a sequence right after powerup, then go to a slow fade. The ball is made of drinking straws and ShiftBrites, and powered by an Arduino.

I thought it would be fun to make my own version of the Times Square ball drop for New Year's Eve. Maybe later I'll build something like this: http://www.timessquarenyc.org/nye/nye_ball.html ... but for now I'll have to go with 32 LEDs instead of 32,256, and drinking straws instead of Waterford crystal. The straw icosahedron first stellation (small triambic icosahedron) was actually built a couple of years ago when I had a package of straws and no job. I simply strapped a bunch of ShiftBrites to it.

Merry Christmas!

I installed 30 ShiftBrites on the front fence this year. I'm pretty happy with the results!

I've been designing some products that attach to an Arduino Diecimila / Duemilanove board. These are typically called shields, and are used to easily add functionality to the basic Arduino platform.  Read more»

I ran across some photos of an impressive project on Flickr, uploaded in mid-2007. tellini on Flickr was apparently building a bar of individually-controlled RGB LEDs, with an Arduino. Only 1.5 years ago, there weren't many options to get this working; the ShiftBrite was a rough concept buried in a folder in my computer. He used a lot of shift registers, a lot of wire, and a lot of hard work. Here's what the prototype looked like: 

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I built a giant red/blue bar graph to display the electoral vote at my house tonight. It uses 32 ShiftBrite RGB LED modules, two CSG-4M LED numerical displays, a Cubloc CB405 with Quick Start 1000 board, and an ACODE-300B Bluetooth module. I used Eric's code from Hackaday last night to scrape CNN's election results. The code runs on a small 400MHz Linux server I always have running for file storage and random scripting.

Here's how I did it:

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ShiftBrite RGB module doing its thing. I realized I didn't have any pictures of the modules lighting up in each color. Planning to get a datasheet written up within the next day or two.

Shifty VU Demo from Garrett Mace on Vimeo.

Here's a demo of the new Shifty VU operating. This is no longer feeding Winamp Data into a Cubloc; the audio signal is rectified, filtered, and amplified with an RC decay, then oversampled with an AVR ATmega128 and displayed as a bar graph. Currently no fancy presets, just red and blue, but I have lots of ideas. Fading orange neon, peak detector, variable speed chasers, etc. Feel free to post your own ideas below!  Read more»

I built these today. Despite appearances, no welding was required. That's all 1/8 inch hardboard and 3/4 inch square hardwood molding, hot glued together. Then I sealed, painted flat black, applied iron-powder paint in various locations, then applied rust agent in multiple layers to get a nice effect. Then I pulled some parts off the TechShop Wall O' Junk and glued them on for extra zing. The tubes contain 10 ShiftBrite modules each, and will be used as left and right VU channels.

I've been working on the LED array a few evenings this week, at TechShop. Most of the work is done, at least the part involving woodworking. I still need to drill 384 holes, paint everything white, then build about 75 circuit boards and wire everything up. Should be done in time for the Maker Faire if I get the controller finished this week. Then there's the control software, and web interface, and Winamp plugin, and the other projects....