A couple of years ago I was working on various designs for forms of decorative lighting and came up with several ideas that I never got round to creating. One of these designs was very similar (virtually identical?) to the works of James Clar and now that I'm finally getting a little bit of spare time I've decided to make some of the designs. The first design that I've started on yesterday and today is almost the same as "Square Eclipse" on James' site. Here's my progess so far... Driver transistors: 64-pin TQFP IC to store patterns The original plan was not to drive the LEDs direct from the microcontroller, but while designing the PCB yesterday I soon found out that I had no space at all for any gear to multiplex the output pins (except direct multiplexing, which I wanted to avoid as it isn't possible to reach 100% duty cycle with this method). I'm partially through building the second one of these, but my back is killing me so I've given up for today. I'll post back with more as I make more progress...
The light output from them is pretty good, but I fear that I may have problems with these LEDs as the cheap China imports do not like PWM very much - the blues and greens seem to fail pretty rapidly (from past experience usually about 25% of the greens seem to fail) so I may end up replacing dud LEDs several times. I really need to find a source of Nichia 5mm RGB LEDs...
allways loving your work stevie! some great stuff! edit: square eclips 2k5 yeah? to be honest i prefer the origional one (the non RGB one) i assume its just blue LEDs and some PWM work... very effective though, my art project for GCSE was based of that, 3 pieces of 300x300 mm plexe CNC engraved (By me) with a pattern, with bits on different layers. so when lit up you got different colours.. if i could only learn ASM i could do this stuff... Edit2: interestly enough, all his work (james clar) is on stripboard, never see and PCB work... so technically, yours is tons neater...
Hi Steve! Great work there! I haven't got around to build anything for myself with the PIC's! I did make a little rubber duck light up (fade in, fade out). I really have to get started on building some cool lightning again! Good luck! L
5mm LEDs are crap. Only have 60% of their intensity left after 4000 hours, whereas Power LEDs still have 70% left after 50000 hrs. Good idea though and well executed.
I don't know where you plucked those figures from, some technical papers from Kingbright suggest that the light output may fall to 90% over ten years.
thats amazing, some of those james clar bits are o that 1000 led cube, then again the price tag on them is pretty high
