Hack the Holidays Forum - Recent Threads

Bipolar White LEDs - It's a Christmas Miracle

scottiebabe — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 02:28:20 GMT

Soft 404

Indecisiveness Before Christmas

DeltaPi — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 23:49:34 GMT

Have you ever had more than one project to work on and didn't know which one do to?

I do, as this happens to me a lot! This year I have three projects That I could try for the Hack-The-Holidays competition, but I don't know which one to go with, as I only have till January 11th. 😬 So, I will leave it up to you guys. Please let me know which one you like the most and why, and any constructive criticism you have for me. Thanks, and merry Christmas!

Descriptions of the projects:

For Most Original I would make a "Naughty or Nice" sign that lights up one with LEDs depending on the emotion the Jetson Nano sees using AI.
For Most Festive I would make a Christmas light controller for Christmas lights you never have to take down, as they change color depending on the season.
For Most Artistic I would make a custom Christmas Countdown clock, that would get the date and time via Wi-Fi and display the day, also maybe telling a fun fact about the day.

[Please visit the site to access the poll]

Have you ever made a 9V battery topper circuit?

scottiebabe — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 20:51:58 GMT

I never have!

I wanted to measure the optical flicker of some new decorative lights that are advertised as being "constant lit".

Naturally, I thought I would just use a reverse biased photodiode and current sense resistor on top of a 9V battery. Then combined with my handheld portable scopemeter I could measure the brightness of these LEDs versus time.

I sacrificed a new 9V battery snap for the endeavor. Perhaps one could salvage the snaps of an expired 9V battery.

So far things look okay. Time will tell if I end up breaking the 9V snaps off... lol

My First 9V Topper Circuit

If I make a second topper circuit I could make a much more luxurious version of this circuit which includes a dual op-amp in a DIP package.

Testing in the Garden

Finally I get to the point of why I built the circuit in the first place! I was curious to see if these product claims were even remotely true:

They claim to be shimmer-free:

At first glance there dosen't appear any addition circuitry in the string lights aside from the LEDs themselves. The plugs look ordinary

(This isn't a blog post or content for competition so excuse the blurry photos for now :) )

Are the LEDs constant-lit?

No, but interestingly they LEDs are active on both halves of a line cycle:

I am still think about this one, it isn't obvious there is a bridge rectifier nestled away in the strand or plug. Perhaps each "LED" has two LEDs in opposing polarities?

Old skool LED Christmas lights are only active one half of the 60 Hz line cycle

Interesting...

A simple game on the RPI Pico

scottiebabe — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 18:44:07 GMT

Pimoroni have recently included support for basic 8x8 pixel sprites in micropython https://github.com/pimoroni/pimoroni-pico/tree/55821d2896ac12732c4e84142ba1fb76d4382dc5/micropython/modules/picographics#sprites

So, I would like to try and make a simple holiday game on a RPI Pico.

I am thinking of something along the lines of:

Where the objective of the game is to avoid airborne objects while dropping presents into chimneys.

Two buttons for Rudolf up/down. Then a third button for santa to drop a present.

I got this Pimoroni example to run with my Pico Display: https://github.com/pimoroni/pimoroni-pico/blob/main/micropython/examples/tufty2040/awesome_game.py

So, I can use that as a starting point. I'm still not sure how I will handle a scrolling scene.

I'll post a quick video of the example code running later.

Edit:

The 8-bit color gives such a cool retro vibe, I love it!

A *Very* early proof of concept:

https://youtu.be/9dCB_k9aZlg

Why can't I comment? ... lol

Get your spangle decorated electronic baubles out! With extra tinsel!

cstanton — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 17:59:00 GMT

For some, it's not Christmas until it's been Thanksgiving.

In the UK, shops don't care, it was just before Halloween before we were suffering the Christmas Chocolates out on the store shelves, so what the heck, let's get planning some projects!

What're your Christmas project plans? Maybe they're not exactly for entering the project14 competition, but they could be!

And y'know what, we have named it 'Hack the Holidays', for me that's Christmas, but it's not necessarily Christmas for everyone - I'd frankly love to see other holiday event electronic projects, now there's a challenge!

Whatever you're celebrating, I'm sure there's a project for it.