todbot blog » blinkm

ThingM at Maker Faire 2010

todbot — Sun, 30 May 2010 23:51:08 +0000

My company ThingM had an official presence at Maker Faire this year. We were showing off the BlinkM line, including the new BlinkM MinM and the LinkM USB BlinkM controller. It was a lot of fun. And packed!

(click any photo to go to larger version on Flickr)

We were in the Maker Shed building, right underneath the Arduino banner, so we got lots of awesome questions about Arduino. The most common: “So I just picked up this thing that says ‘works with Arduino’…well, what *is* Arduino?” It was so great to see so many people interested [...]

Momentary Button as On/Off Toggle using 555

todbot — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 06:29:15 +0000

(as a few had noticed, I had an error in the schematic shown. It’s been updated, thanks!)

A recent question from a friend who made a really cool BlinkM hoodie was: How can you turn a momentary button press into an on/off toggle?

There are tons of ways to do this if you like getting into electronics. Most all work off of some flip-flop like principle. And while I could have suggested a true flip-flop chip, I thought it would be cooler if you could use a 555 timer chip (which contains a single flip-flop and a couple [...]

I2CScanner.pde: Arduino as I2C bus scanner

todbot — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:28:31 +0000

One of the challenges of working with I2C (aka “two-wire” or “TWI” or “Wire”) devices is knowing the I2C address of the device. Older devices have a fixed address, or a “choose one-of-four” approach. But newer I2C devices have fully programmable addresses, leading to cases of not knowing what address a device is at.

Fortunately, there’s a technique one can use to “scan” an I2C bus and determine these addresses. Conceptually it’s very similar to a network “ping”. Below is an Arduino sketch “I2CScanner.pde” that turns an Arduino into an I2C bus scanner.

- I2CScanner.pde — Turn Arduino into [...]

Scary Shifty Servo Eyeballs

todbot — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:18:42 +0000

If you want a slightly different look for your Halloween pumpkin or skull, you can pretty quickly whip something up with a few servos and an Arduino. Here’s a set of Scary Shifty Servo Eyeballs, for instance: It looks around randomly…what’s over there!… wait, what’s that!

As you can probably tell it’s a pretty simple arrangement (click for bigger):

Building It

It consists of the following components: - 2 toy eyeballs or ping pong balls painted like eyeballs - 2 small servos (HXT500 from HobbyKing.com or similar) - 1 standard servo - 1 Arduino with tiny breadboard rubber-banded on top - 2 BlinkMs, one for each [...]

Behold the Crystal Monster

todbot — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:13:38 +0000

The Crystal Monster is an art piece created by Beverly Tang and Tod E. Kurt (me). It’s on display in the Continental Gallery on 4th & Spring St in downtown Los Angeles. The shape and structure of the Crystal Monster are Beverly’s design. I created the lighting and the electronics. It’s made from over 400 sheets of laser-cut acrylic, more that 240 feet of LED tape (>2200 RGB LEDs!), and around 500 steel rods and other steel hardware. It’s approximately 12 feet long and 10 feet wide and hovers 10 feet above your head. It’s [...]

Using MaxM with flexible RGB tape

todbot — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:41:30 +0000

A single BlinkM MaxM can easily drive a 5 meter (16 ft) roll of the flexible RGB SMD LED tape that’s used for architectural lighting. Each roll contains 150 RGB LEDs.

Each LED in the tape is a SMD RGB "5050" LED, capable of putting out about 6000mcd. The spacing between LEDs is 3.3cm (~1.25").

Every 3 LEDs is a cut mark with solder tabs so you can cut or join pieces of tape.

Max current for a 5m roll is about 1.9 Amps. I did a quick test of MaxM driving three rolls at about 6A and [...]

Multiple BlinkM MaxM Blasters on one Master

todbot — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:50:17 +0000

BlinkM MaxMs will be back in stock soon. Over on our GetSatisfaction area, there’s a question on how to use multiple BlinkM MaxM “Blaster” LED boards with one MaxM “Master” driver board. It’s possible and only just a little tricky. The Blaster board is powered by the 5V voltage regulator built-in to the Master board. That regulator is designed to power just one Master and one Blaster. If you try to drive multiple Blasters with it, it might work, but we don’t recommended it and could blow up your Master board.

Instead, it’s better to drive [...]

BlinkM & Arduino 3D models

todbot — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:41:02 +0000

Here’s a really quick 3D model of BlinkM, if anyone needs it. It’s accurate to ~0.1mm.

- blinkm.skp — BlinkM SketchUp model - rgb_led_piranha.skp — Piranha RGB LED SketchUp model

And here it is plugged into the awesomely done Arduino Diecimila model by Jon-Paul from the Google 3D Warehouse.

SketchUp is pretty great, but I found a problem with it if you’re trying to make accurate to-scale electronic parts: it won’t create surfaces with an area of <1mm. Took me a while to figure that out. The solution is to make a 10x or 100x size version and then do [...]

Get on the BlinkM Bus with a BlinkM Cylon

todbot — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:43:02 +0000

BlinkMs are a lot of fun by themselves, but they’re also little network devices, each having its own address on an I2C network. Here’s where I think BlinkM can really shine since it makes controlling multiple RGB LEDs pretty easy. For Maker Faire, I wanted to show off this facet by having a single Arduino control a dozen or so BlinkMs on a single I2C bus. The result is shown in the little video below.

Read on for how this was put together.

Overall Design

Controlling several RGB LEDs is no small task, BlinkM makes it easier and I wanted [...]

ThingM & BlinkM at Maker Faire!

todbot — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:25:49 +0000

ThingM (Mike and me and some friends) will be at Maker Faire Bay Area 2008 this weekend. Come by and visit us!

Our bench will be about “Experiments with Smart LEDs”. Basically we’re showing off BlinkM, the projects that led up to BlinkM, like my experiments with Smart LEDs, some future products we’re working on, and some fun projects using these gizmos.

Here’s some photos of some of the projects as they were being built:

And lots of the projects will be using various types of Arduino, if you’re into that sort of thing.

“WiiChuck” Wii Nunchuck Adapter Available

todbot — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 02:41:17 +0000

Want to hook up a Wii Nunchuck to an Arduino but don’t want to cut up the cord on your Nunchuck? Yeah me too. So I made some of these:

It’s a small PCB that adapts the Wii Nunchuck connector to standard 4-pin header. I call it the “wiichuck adapter”. It plugs directly into the Arduino, no wiring necessary. You can get one too for $4.

Available from the following wonderful shops: - FunGizmos.com. FREE DOMESTIC SHIPPING. International shipping for $1 more. - Tinker.it (UK) - Little Bird Electronics (Australia) - Sparkfun. Ships domestic & internationally. [...]

BlinkM for Obama on BoingBoing

todbot — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:27:22 +0000

Yay, BlinkM made it onto BoingBoing!

“Homemade Obama “hope beacon” with LED light thingies”

It’s a pity there isn’t a movie of the poster in action. I’d like to see how the light script they programmed into the BlinkMs looked.

BlinkM Hello, Video Guides, Example Code

todbot — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:54:04 +0000

This is a BlinkM: BlinkMs are “smart LEDs”, a type of smart interface component. A BlinkM consists of an ultrabirght RGB LED backed with a microcontroller with built-in knowledge about 24-bit color spaces, color fading, and color pattern generation. All in a package 0.6” wide. You talk to it over I2C, a serial protocol spoken by many different things. (Arduino speaks it, as do Basic Stamps, and your PC) And you can have over 100 BlinkMs on the same serial bus, each individually addressable. Here’s how they can hook up to an Arduino:

BlinkMs are available from SparkFun [...]

WineM lights, a BlinkM predecessor

todbot — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:12:25 +0000

With BlinkMs available for purchase soon, I figured it would be neat to show what a large collection of them can do. BlinkMs were created from my desire to have a “smart LED” that did its own tri-color PWM. I didn’t want to build a real-time system to control the PWM of several hundred RGB LEDs. And existing LED controllers didn’t meet my needs. I wanted something that knew a bit about color and color patterns and could be networked together into clusters. Thus BlinkM. A single BlinkM is fun, but the real utility is seen when [...]