Feeling festive and with a new toy to play with, I have been occupying my time with a very bright, colourful and wonderfully entertaining 32 LED strip. After playing with the demos and adding simple tilt controls, I decided to makes something useful- a variable-intensity, multicoloured clock.
While it is more of a timepiece rather than a clock (telling the time is not intuitive), it has a hypnotic feel as time slowly passes from one side to another in the form of glowing points. The brightness can be gradually increased or decreased allowing for an artificial sunrise and sunset, while a strobe effect can be used as an alarm.
All in all it is a little half a day hack before term starts. Is it useful? perhaps. Am I glad I have it? definitely.
Blue represents seconds, green minutes, and red hours. The clock runs from right to left so I can read it while in bed, gets brighter at 0500 to wake me up, then dims at 2300 to send me to sleep.
Components:
1x Teensyduino (or other Arduino-like device)
1x Adafruit Digital Addressable RGB LED Strip
Libraries:
SPI (included with Arduino V1.0)
Code: