June 23, 2014

Adding colourful effects to shelving units with Arduino

For those who want more out of their kitchen shelves, or fancy a different method of lighting rooms when having a party - then the solution is to embed some RGB LEDs in the appropriate furniture. This has been demosntrated by Gael Reinaudi who shows how easy it is to install and control LEDs to generate some colourful an interesting patterns and effects. The code is quite minimal and the results are spectacular, for example:

For more day-to-day uses the changing colours could be used to indicate ambient temperature and humidity by reading data from a sensor, or match the patterns of the sun. For detailed instructions on how to repeat this yourself, check out Gael's Instructable page. And for more, we're on facebook, twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.

 

If you're looking to make more creative designs with LEDs, consider the Freetronics RGBLED: full colour module. It includes a bright RGB LED on the top of the board and a WS2801 constant-current, addressable, multi-channel LED driver on the back. This smart module can be daisy-chained, so you can connect a number of these together in a string and drive each of the module colours individually from your microcontroller. For more information and to order, visit the product page.

 

Leave a comment

Comments have to be approved before showing up.