Light

Developing a LED & Motion installation

2 December 2011 Projects
The Interactive Matter HL1606 installation

You may know that the whole spring and summer has been a bit quiet over here at Interactive Matter. And again for a reason. I was asked by a friend to build the electronics for a massive LED installation for the  ‘Hsinchu Biomedical Science Park Exhibition Center’. The result was very impressive: An 10 meter [...]

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SkatePOV

5 April 2010 Projects
SkatePOV @ night

SkatePOV brings POV to your skate board. It is a minified version of MiniPOV2 attachable to your skateboard. Draw texts while skating! The LEDs pulse to write the text. By moving the skateboard (aka skating) the blinking is converted into a matrix and the blinking becomes the text. This is the first project in a [...]

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SFH 3310 & SFH 5711 Light Sensors

18 May 2009 Sensors
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After I successfully shed some light its time to see some light. For this you normally use photo diodes, photo transistors or photo resistors. But there are two nice little detectors which I came across, special enough to post them here: The Osram SFH 3710 and SFH 5711. Both are photo diodes respectively transistors adapted [...]

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Low Voltage RGB LED

9 May 2009 Tinkering
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Most of my parts want a 3.3V voltage supply. Most of my projects relay on a single coin cell battery at 3V. But driving an RGB LED from 3V is no fun at all. Lets take for example a nice strong RGB LED like the Osram LRTB G6TG – the green channel runs at 3.2V, [...]

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Space Invaders Button

13 April 2009 Projects
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The reason I started all this microcontroller stuff was that I wanted to create an animated button displaying space invaders characters. Preferably the same size as an normal button (the ones you put on your jacket, not your panel). Now here it is: If you do not see the electronics for this small display read [...]

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Gravitron

23 December 2008 Projects
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Playing around with gravity: A basic piece exploring interaction with gravity. It is (again) half a ping pong ball. On the rim there is a red dot, which always stays up. You can turn it as you want – the red dot will go up again. Video after the click.

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How was your day, darling?

1 October 2008 Projects
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After some previous testings I did finish the final Version of How was you day, darling? – or shorter “hwydd”: It is a small object (actually half a ping pong ball), interacting with its owner and environment (and being pretty boring without interaction). The object permanently aggregates light samples (i.e. it measures the every second [...]

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How was your day: The first prototype

25 August 2008 Projects
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After the first idea was born a project name and prototype was created: The project name “How was your day, darling?” or shortly “hwydd” refers to the interaction of the device. After you come home you take it in your hand and the device tells you how its day has been. A neat little reactive [...]

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Tinkering with ADJD-S371-Q999

17 August 2008 Sensors
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The initial idea of “How was your day, darling” was to record the colors for a day. You know a morning is golden, evening is reddish, thunderstorm is greenish and so on. Measuring this with a simple RGB LED is a brave approach – but hard and cumbersome. So I ordered an ADJD-S371-Q999 color sensor [...]

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