Make Your Own Homemade LED Christmas Lights

If you have trouble with all of your Christmas lights going out when only one bulb becomes burnt out or stepped on and if you feel up to the challenge, you can build your own strand of LED Christmas lights. Whats even better is that you will wire the lights in parelell which means that when one bulb goes out the rest will stay on. Not only is it cool to have Christmas lights that you made yourself but, the LED's last over 100,000 hours, they produce little heat, they use minimal energy, and the bulbs aren't hallow which makes them virtually indestructable. Check out the instructions on how to build them. However, you will need tons of LED's, (can be bought at your local electronics store) lots of resistor, some solder, and the ability to solder. Good luck!

Interactive Conversation Detecting Table

This is a pretty neat hack although it serves no real purpose. The creators say that they want it to be a more "cultural piece" and not a "problem solving gadget." To see some pictures visit their flikr page.

Golf Club POV

"So we were thinking about how we could have a POV while making it useful. Well since people like to hit up the driving range or the golf course at times, we figured we could just make a POV out of a golf club. At the same time, we can make it kinda useful too.

As you can see, the letters will go backwards on the back swing and forwards on the forward swing. Ben Hogan’s “Five Lessons” has a good picture of correct swing arc for a golf swing."

If you already have a golf club than the whole projects will cost you about $74.00.

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Giant DIY LED Clock

This giant clock from SparkFun looks expensive and hard to build however, it is made mostly of styrofoam, fiberboard and green LED strips. The whole thing is controlled by a simple circuit and didn't cost much to build. See the picture below for a better understanding of the basic design.

Guitar Hero LED Mod

Guitar Hero rocks, but it really needs some lights to liven up the virtual shredding.

What to do? Cram in some LEDs!

LED Hard Drive Clock

Ian has made an LED hard drive clock by using flashing LED's and a spinning CD with a slit in it to create patterns. He uses an LED strip from Super Bright LED's and programed the whole thing himself. The CD spins at 90 RPM which tricks the human eyes into thinking that it isn't flashing which is the reason that we see solid patterns. The thing, as you can hear from the video, is pretty loud, but later on Ian plans on building a plexiglass case to enclose the project to reduce the sound levels.

Worlds First Fan LED Sign

The Ultimate Sports Fan Sign!! - video powered by Metacafe
Another video by KipKay. What a great idea!

Halloween Animated LED Lights

Here is a picture from Daughtery of his finished animated LED Halloween eyes. He uses an LMDriver Platform and the whole think is driven by an Atmel ATMega169 Micro controller. Check out his website for the video which really shows how cool these things really are because, the picture doesn't do a justice. He also has the code that he used and is selling them on his website so for anyone interested just visit the link.

Custom XBox Controller

This is an XBox controller that someone made from stripping a regular controller and soldering some old school style controls. They also made the nifty little box that it's in and adds some cool LED's for an even cooler effect.

LED Throwie

This is an idea from Graffiti Research Lab and is pretty clever. All it involves is a battery, an LED, some tape, and a small powerful magnet. All that you need to do is connect the battery to the LED with the tape then connect the magnet to the battery with some more tape. Then you just, well, uh, throw. The wide range of places that these could be put is endless; on cars, refrigerators, bridges, street lights, buildings, ect.