Category: Home stories

Recent­ly, I stum­bled upon an adver­tise­ment for this object. It is a gad­get called Blink(1), which can be plugged into a USB port and which has two col­or LEDs, one on top and one on the bot­tom, that can be con­trolled by a piece of com­put­er soft­ware to show any col­or in any bright­ness. The gad­get is cost­ing around 40 swiss franks and it has a nice piece of con­trol soft­ware, which can be used to make the gad­get light in many dif­fer­ent use­ful ways. For exam­ple, IFTTT (If This Then That) can be used to make it light in var­i­ous col­ors upon giv­en con­di­tions, or URLs, files or scripts can be called to define col­or com­bi­na­tions, or a mail­box can make it light up if a giv­en num­ber of new mails arrive, or if the mail of your sig­nif­i­cant oth­er arrives or if the mail has a cer­tain sub­ject line. Or you warn of a low bat­tery, or when the CPU load exceeds a cer­tain percentage.

Con­tin­ue read­ing Lava lamp project, part 3 — mk2

In part 1, I described the hard­ware of my project of a com­put­er con­trol­lable lava lamp. In this sec­ond part, I want to dis­cuss the nec­es­sary firmware, which is the soft­ware nec­es­sary to teach the Picaxe Micro­con­troller the desired functionality.

We need to keep two areas in focus:

1. We need to be able to read the desired col­or val­ues from the USB ser­i­al port, defin­ing the desired inten­si­ties of the col­ors green, red and blue.
2. These desired val­ues have to be turned into actu­al light in desired col­or and inten­si­ty. This means, the LEDs have to be turned on.

Con­tin­ue read­ing Lava lamp project, part 2 — firmware

I want­ed to build a device that can light in dif­fer­ent col­ors, and where the col­ors can be con­trolled from a com­put­er. My idea was to hook it up with a com­put­er, who then should sig­nal some state by light­ing the appro­pri­ate col­or. For exam­ple, while build­ing and com­pil­ing a pro­gram, the lamp should blink in blue col­or. When the build is fin­ished, the lamp should light either in green (when the build ran fine) or red (when some­thing went wrong).

I found the lava lamp shown to the right, which is equipped with a col­or-chang­ing LED and is pow­ered from USB. I bought one and intend­ed to mod­i­fy the con­trol­ling elec­tron­ics to my purposes.

Con­tin­ue read­ing Lava lamp project, part 1 — hardware