Leds & Light Hacks

Incredible, Colorful RGB LED Light Strip

Incredible, Colorful RGB LED Light Strip

This incredible, RGB LED light strip allows you to address each and every LED individually, creating splendid color patters. If you were challenged by the Open Source POV Bicycle Wheel Animation project we covered last week or were thinking of...
Make a DIY Fiber Optic Star Ceiling

Make a DIY Fiber Optic Star Ceiling

Fiber optics are just plain amazing. They carry data at ridiculous speeds and have a whole assortment of lighting possibilities too. There are a few main types of fiber optics including end glow and side glow (pretty self explanatory) and cheap...
RGB Computer Controlled LED Bottle Wall

RGB Computer Controlled LED Bottle Wall

What is it about the combination of color and light which makes us automatically drawn to it ? Quite appropriately the video demo of Alex Beim’s LED bottle wall project is without sound. It’s all visual illumination as we watch 253 bottles...
Open Source POV Bicycle Wheel Animation

Open Source POV Bicycle Wheel Animation

We recently covered a fantastic POV system which displays animation or pictures on your bicycle tires as you ride. Instead of buying that kit, you can learn to make your own quite easily. This open source POV bike tutorial walks you through the...
EL Wire Powered Ethernet Patch Cables

EL Wire Powered Ethernet Patch Cables

Forget the days of trying to locate the correct cables in patch rooms like the one pictured above. Using power over ethernet (POE), this hacker laced a standard patch cable with Electroluminescent wire (abbreviated as EL wire) allowing him to...
DIY Virtual Reality using the Wiimote

DIY Virtual Reality using the Wiimote

See also: Top 30 Wiimote Hacks of the Web Anyone who's interested in virtual reality will find German Timo Fleisch quite fascinating. He's the one who originally came up with a way to combine Nintendo Wii remotes and IR LED's, in order to create...
How to Build your own Tesla Coil

How to Build your own Tesla Coil

Once you've seen a big home-built Tesla coil in operation, you may decide you've got to have one too, even if it's just a tabletop version to play around with. There are companies offering detailed plans and DIY kits containing all materials...
Desktop Helium Neon Laser Lamp Build

Desktop Helium Neon Laser Lamp Build

Here's another fantastic tutorial from Jay, a DIY lasers expert. See all of our DIY laser projects. I'd like to show off my new desk top laser lamp! It's a fairly simple project and makes for a nice display piece. Basically, this is a 10 inch...
Bicycle Wheel LED Video Displays

Bicycle Wheel LED Video Displays

Monkeylectric has just released the newest version of their bicycle mounted video displays. Using four strips of RGB LEDs on each wheel, you can display any video or image on your bike wheels while you ride. A full video demonstration below...
High Power Laser Build With Thermoelectric Cooling

High Power Laser Build With Thermoelectric Cooling

Here's a fantastic tutorial from Jay, a DIY lasers expert. This tutorial will walk you through building your own incredibly high power laser and cooling it using Peltier plates. The peltiers are cheap and so is the box, fan, and heatsink. The big...