Spanish practice Smart & Green Design has re-designed the Barbican’s touring Game On exhibition for a former underground cistern in Madrid, using more than 150 LED arches to evoke the neon colours of the 1980s.
The retrospective, which is reportedly the largest international exhibition to explore the history of video games, spans more than 400 collector’s objects and drawings covering the birth of the technology in the 1960s to the present day.
I’m not sure transparent screens will ever catch on but they are pretty intriguing. Watch EvanAndKatelyn tear down a tv monitor to make their own see through screen on YouTube!
Everyone is going crazy for the new Matrix Portal microcontroller, a board that makes controlling any of Adafruit’s RGB Matrix Displays really easy. It’s a plug-and-play solution – just plug the board into the back of the display and start creating slideshows, animations, or internet connected applications. The possibilities are endless.
This new guide from Erin St. Blaine shows how to modify a messenger bag or backpack to display your RGB Matrix through a vinyl window in the bag. The sample code shows how to display a variety of different slide shows, and makes use of the Matrix Portal’s onboard accelerometer to darken the screen whenever you set the bag down for more than a minute, in order to save battery life.
From the guide:
Make a display for your display! Show off your message to the world. This guide will show how to set up and assemble a Matrix Portal and RGB Matrix display, then make a transparent pocket in your backpack, purse, or messenger bag to show it off.
There is also a simple code example that displays your bmp images in slideshow fashion. Use the onboard buttons to switch between folders and play different messages, or pause on your favorite image. Set your bag down and the onboard accelerometer will sense that you’re not moving and dim the screen to save battery life.
You can also use any of the other Matrix Portal code samples to get you started. Get ready to have fun with all the features the Matrix Portal offers.
Solder Party released their Keyboard FeatherWing, a solution for easily adding a screen and a keyboard to your Feather project!
Here are just some of the features of the Keyboard FeatherWing:
2.6” 320×240 16-bit color LCD w/ resistive touch screen
QWERTY keyboard
5-way button
4 soft tactile buttons
A NeoPixel
microSD connector
Stemma QT/Qwiic connector
On/Off switch
Four mounting holes
WiFi, Bluetooth, LoRa, Linux, FPGA? You make the rules! The Keyboard FeatherWing itself does not contain an MCU/CPU/SoC that you can program; you can use any board compatible with the Adafruit Feather System!
Inspired by many LED cube projects before me, I decided to build my own version, which eventually turned into a CPU status indicator on my desk. Is there a more over the top way to monitor your CPU temperature and usage than 12,288 individually addressable RGB LEDs arranged as a cube?
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
Want to add LED’s to your Halloween costume this year? Check out this incredible easy and informative tutorial from Becky Stern!
Today I’m going to show you how to create a simple yet customizable LED and battery circuit that’s perfect for putting inside your next project. This is a great first soldering project! Follow along with the video to practice your technique.
The most basic LED circuit can be made by sandwiching the legs around a coincell battery. This is also a good way to identify the positive and negative legs of the LED since it will only light up one way. That’s because LEDs are diodes, which allow electricity to flow one way, but not the other. The positive side of the battery should be touching the positive, usually longer, leg of the LED.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Every day this month we’ll be bringing you ideas and projects for an Electronic Halloween! Expect wearables, hacks & mods, costumes and more here on the Adafruit blog! Working on a project for Halloween this year? Share it with us in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, Discord, Instagram or Twitter— we’d love to see what you’re up to and share it with the world (tag your posts #ElectronicHalloween). You can also send us a blog tip! Tune in to our live shows, 3D hangouts with Noe and Pedro, Show and Tell and Ask an Engineer, featuring ideas for projects, costumes, decorations, and more!
This NEW GUIDE presents an accurate moon phase clock for the Adafruit Matrix Portal M4 board and any of our HUB75 RGB LED matrices, programmed with CircuitPython!
Most wall calendars and news sources, if they even mention Moon phases, there’s about a 50/50 chance that they’re off by a full day.
The only way to get a correct Moon phase for your time and location is with math and science. Our Matrix Portal Moon phase clock lets you know where things stand right here and now, portraying the Moon’s phase more accurately than a printed calendar, and whether it’s currently in the sky or has set.
We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.
Using the plug-in MatrixPortal board we just released last week, we were able to make a sign that we brought to the Ruth Bader Ginsburg memorial vigil in NYC. The code displays three initials and then scrolls through an image of the Justice. We used the matrix magnetic feet to temporarily attach it to PT’s bag, it was solid but easy to remove at the end of the night – video
Quotes! Who doesn’t love good quotes? But who’s to decide which quotes are “good”? Well, you are, of course!
Now, you can create your own quote board and supply the quotes for it yourself! No need to rely on a website and some other person’s curatorial tastes.
With this project, you’ll create a custom quote feed right on Adafruit IO, then code your CircuitPython-powered WiFi RGB LED matrix to display your quotes in random order.
Using the plug-in MatrixPortal board we just released last week, we were able to make a sign that we brought to the Ruth Bader Ginsburg memorial vigil in NYC. The code displays three initials and then scrolls through an image of the Justice. We used the matrix magnetic feet to temporarily attach it to PT’s bag, it was solid but easy to remove at the end of the night – Video.
Our pixel dust library for Arduino was an easy port to these RGB matrices – this is a 32 x 64 matrix with a Feather M4 + RGB Matrix Featherwing for easy wiring. An accelerometer is used to determine the tilt and then some particle physics math draws the pixels as if they were reacting to gravity. Also looks nice with some black LED acrylic on top! – video.
We picked up a cool sample – this is a flexible OLED display, 6″ diagonal. It’s 1280p so looks great and is somewhat flexible. Could make for a nifty wearable board. It comes with an HDMI to MIPI converter which is also interesting – video.
This beautiful 2.7″ 400×240 pixel monochrome display is the same as the one in the PlayDate game console. It uses simple SPI to draw, and our library works even with this large size! You can get about 15~20FPS with these screens, they are very low power and daylight readable – video.
We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.
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Every June 23 we highlight women in engineering who have made an impact. In hopes to share some inspiration and help get #INWED19 trending we flooded the Adafruit blog with #ShapeTheWorld posts! Read more.
YouTube’s favorite comedic maker, Simone Giertz, is at it again. In this video, she continues her strange love affair with out-sized scissors by making a scissors desk lamp with lights inside that are revealed when you open it.
I think it would’ve been cooler if the switch had been built into the scissors so that when you open them, the lights go on and cut off when it’s closed. But that’s a picky quibble. This is another fun and entertaining Simone build with lots of funny one-liners.
Warning: Salty adult language and lots of innuendo ahead.
About using electronic stuff looks at returning to the darkroom to print black and white photographs from digital pictures.
They decided to get a 13″ LCD 4K monochrome display. 3840 x 2160 pixels – more than 8 Megapixels – and a density of 330 pixel/inch (1 pixel is 76 micron). There is no backlight, and it connects to a computer HDMI port through an adaptor board. It was bought from Duobond Displays Shenzhen.
The picture is displayed on the screen and the light shines through, exposing the photo paper.
I removed the dust from the projector, get the 3 chemicals and black and white paper. I spent a bit of time to make the cave lightproof, but after all it is not very complicated.
After the first test, I was happy to see that the LCD is perfectly able to block the light with black pixels and let enough light to pass through with white pixels. Making on the paper respectively white and black pixels.
Pixels are visible on both prints and are about the same size. However, the LCD leaves tiny vertical lines.
We’ve got a great new tutorial from Erin St. Blaine on the Adafruit Learn System: Make it Glow – How to Solder NeoPixels. If you’ve wanted to get started with making light up costumes, projects, or artwork, or have just been looking for a new hobby, this is a really great place to start. From the guide:
This guide is for beginners who are ready to take the next step in DIY electronics: putting that soldering iron to use to add NeoPixel or other addressable LED lights to your project.
You don’t have to be able to solder to use NeoPixels! Here is a beginner tutorial that shows how to use NeoPixels with no soldering: Make it Glow – Your First NeoPixel Project
However, there are times when soldering is really the best option. If you want to use NeoPixel rings, or individual pixels, or create more elaborate or complicated designs with multiple strips, there’s really no way to do it without soldering.
The good news: it’s not as hard as you think! There are a fair number of tools to acquire, but once you’ve got your station set up, a whole world of creative possibilities will open up for you.
In this guide, we’ll recommend some tools and equipment that every DIY electronics maker should have in their workshop. Then, we’ll go over the techniques and skills needed to get a good solder connection, and how to secure your connections it so they are sturdy and reliable.
Finally, we’ll cover some techniques for repairing broken strips, and troubleshooting help for when your project just won’t behave the way you want.
Check it out — we can’t wait to see what you create!
In honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, today we are highlighting the important and impactful work of Japanese- American physicist Shuji Nakamura who invented efficient blue light-emitting diodes.
Shuji Nakamura was born in Ikata, Japan. After studying electrical engineering at the University of Tokushima, he worked at the chemical and electronics company Nichia in Tokushima. This is where he conducted his Nobel Prize-awarded work. He received his doctorate in 1994 from the University of Tokushima and left Nichia in 1999 to become a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the United States.
This project was created as a throwback to a much simpler toy, the Etch-a-Sketch, but instead of moving a tiny stylus to wipe aluminum particles off of a glass surface, this one plots pixels onto an RGB matrix.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
