Horten Fyr is Norwegian for Blinkie

Our Norwegian is pretty weak, so we struggled a little bit with the documentation for a big public LED art project in the lighthouse (translated) in Horten, Norway. But we do speak the universal language of blinkies, and this project has got them: 3,008 WS2812b LEDs ring the windows at the top of the lighthouse and create reactive patterns depending on the wave height and proximity of the ferry that docks there.

This seems to be an evolving project, with more features being added slowly over time. We love the idea of searching for the WiFi access point on the ferry to tell when it’s coming in to port, and the wave height sensor should also prove interesting data, with trends at the low-frequency tidal rate as well as higher frequency single waves that come in every few seconds. What other inputs are available? How many are too many?

It’s so cool that a group of tech-minded art hackers could get access to a big building like this. Great job, [Jan] and [Rasmus] and [everyone else]!

Filed under: led hacks

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Open Your Garage Door With Your Smartphone

The eternal enemy of [James Puderer]’s pockets is anything that isn’t his smartphone. When the apartment building he resides in added a garage door, the forces of evil gained another ally in the form of a garage door opener. So, he dealt with the insult by rigging up a Raspberry Pi to act as a relay between the opener and his phone.

The crux of the setup is Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) — a Google service that allows messages to be sent to devices that generally have dynamic IP addresses, as well as the capacity to send messages upstream, in this case from [Puderer]’s cell phone to his Raspberry Pi. After whipping up an app — functionally a button widget — that sends the command to open the door over FCM, he set up the Pi in a storage locker near the garage door and was able to fish a cable with both ethernet and power to it. A script running on the Pi triggers the garage door opener when it receives the FCM message and — presto — open sesame.

Why not try Bluetooth or a simple WiFi connection? As it turns out, the former was impossible due to distance, while the latter meant leaving his Raspberry Pi on an open network — not a comfortable option. As [Puderer] notes, this is an alternative method to get some of your devices at home onto the Internet of Things while avoiding some of its security pitfalls.

With Internet of Things devices cropping up everywhere, it’s not surprising they can even take the shape of trash cans.

Filed under: home hacks, Raspberry Pi

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McLaren and BMW team up to build engines again

BMW

For plenty of car nerds, the names McLaren and BMW together mean something special in the engine department. BMW built the legendary 6.1L V12 that powered the McLaren F1, an engine that, in its detuned state, won Le Mans more than once. In the years since the F1, McLaren's cars have been powered by Mercedes-Benz and, more latterly, a family of 3.8L twin-turbo V8s. Now McLaren and BMW are joining forces to work on engines once more.

The plan is to increase the specific output—the amount of power per unit volume—of the engines in McLaren's forthcoming road cars while trying to meet socially acceptable CO₂ limits. The two companies will also work with Ricardo (the British engineering company that helped develop McLaren's current M838T engine), Grainger and Worrall (which will handle casting), Lentus Composites (composite materials), and the University of Bath.

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An Awesome Interactive LED Table

If you want to create a large display with a matrix of LEDs, it’s a relatively straightforward process. Thanks to addressable LED tape and microcontrollers it becomes more of a software issue than one of hardware. [Vincent Deconinck] had some inexpensive WS2812 strips, so he sliced into an inexpensive IKEA coffee table  and mounted them in a grid beneath an acrylic sheet. Some work with Arduino Nanos and a Raspberry Pi later, and he had a very acceptable LED matrix table.

An attractive hack, you might say, and leave it at that. But he wasn’t satisfied enough to leave it there, and so to make something rather special he decided to add interactivity. With an infra-red emitter and receiver as part of each pixel, he was able to turn an LED table into an LED touchscreen, though to be slightly pedantic it’s not sensing touch as such.

The design of the IR sensors was not entirely straightforward though, because to ensure reliable detection and avoid illumination from the LED they had to be carefully mounted and enclosed in a tube. He also goes into some detail on the multiplexing circuitry he used to drive the whole array from more Arduinos and a GPIO expander.

The write-up for this project is a long one, but it’s well worth the read as the result is very impressive. There are several videos but we’ll show you the final one, the table playing touch screen Tetris.

We’ve featured another Lack table with LEDs, but you might comment that it lacked the touch element of this one. And of course, there is York Hackspace’s Tetris Table.

Filed under: led hacks