Photons, Electrons, and Dirt

A white Color Kinetics ColorBlast 4, a black Color Kinetics C200, and two super-colorful My First Neopixel dance party lights.

Inspired by various colorful and chonky kids toys and some old Color Kinetics architectural fixtures, this colorful Neopixel spotlight packs an Adafruit Sparkle Motion Mini into its base and can be controlled over Wi-Fi using your choice of development environments. Read on to learn how to 3D print and build your own to bring a bit of colorful light into your work or living space!

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A friend forwarded a video of the lizard slapping the lizard emoji on their phone and I instantly knew I needed to do the same! My phone doesn’t sound out emojis though so I built a single-purpose sound board that does one thing and one thing only: it says Lizard every time you press the button. Follow along to build your own using off-the-shelf electronics and some 3D printing!

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Tired of taking the trash out in the dark? Forgot to turn on the outside lights on the way to the trash cans? Read on to learn how I built a waterproof, battery-powered Zigbee hall-effect sensor to automatically turn on my backyard landscape lights when I open the gate to go into the backyard at night.

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Rinsing the bike off after a muddy night ride can be needed. Being able to see what you’re doing without getting your phone out or going inside the house is great.

Ever want to control some outdoor lighting without using your phone or going back in the house? Read on to see how I installed a set of landscape lights then built a set of outdoor, waterproof Zigbee buttons to control them using an nRF52840 module, Zigbee2MQTT, Python, and TinyTuya.

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Two XMCOSY+ RGBW light strings hanging in my backyard over my snow-covered lawn.

Two years ago, I hung a set of generic G50 RGB globe lights in the backyard. They weren’t exactly waterproof and the individual lights became water logged and started acting erratically. This year, I replaced them with two sets of XMCOSY+ RGBW Patio String Lights. The new XMCOSY lights look great and I like that there’s real white LEDs in them so they can provide both decoration and functional illumination for my backyard. Read on to find out more about the installation, the lights, controlling them with WLED, and, new to me, controlling them locally with TinyTuya.

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The Ustellar 100 W light set box and one of the lights.

In my my last post, I looked at four different sets of inexpensive LED flood lights to see which could be controlled using WLED. While they all could be controlled with WLED to some extent, only some could take advantage of WLED’s extensive library of built-in effects. In this post, I’m going to take a detailed look at the 100W version of Ustellar’s GemBand set of six RGBW smart flood lights. It’s a little different than the previous sets but can still be controlled with WLED with one pretty big caveat.

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A Few of the Contenders

I’m always looking for new LED lights for Halloween, Christmas, and just general tinkering. My preference is for lights that can be modified to be controlled locally by WLED. Controlling the lights locally lets me integrate the lights into larger displays and coordinate the colors of all the connected lights using software like xLights. I recently purchased a few sets of random LED lights from 3rd party sellers on Amazon. Read on to find out which ones can be rewired to work with WLED and, by extension, xLights.

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In this post, I disassemble a 747 fuel quantity indicator and reverse engineer the electromechanical parts of the indicator. I then apply hardware and software techniques used on previous projects to build a PID controller for a control loop consisting of the AC servo motor and feedback potentiometer in the indicator. This control loop is used to position the dial and counter on the face of the instrument to values entered into a serial terminal.

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In this project, I use a Python script and an updated version of my digital-to-synchro project to replay my mountain bike climbs and descents at 60x real time speed on a vintage aircraft altitude indicator. The updated D2S converter fits on a single board and uses three Microchip MCP4802 DACs and three TI OPA548 power operational amplifiers to produce high-power 400 Hz AC waveforms to power and control the servo loop in the altitude indicator.

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In this post, I take a look at a vintage Kollsman aircraft electric tachometer indicator. I start by disassembling the tachometer to determine how it works then build up a variable-frequency power supply to power and test the indicator. Once the power supply and indicator are working, I measure the speed of the motor inside the indicator to determine the number of poles on the motor. Finally, I repurpose this indicator as a unique CPU performance meter.

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