Monthly Archives: May 2012

No, I won’t make you a Chris Jericho jacket, but here’s how I would if I wanted to

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I’ve done a few commissioned pieces for artists and musicians on this blog, but I would like to make it clear that my primary objective is to provide educational content for my viewers and to also catalog my work for my own future reference.

Basically, I’d be happy to make something for you as long as it is sufficiently challenging, new, and interesting.  The DJ Jacket and ongoing EL Panel shirt projects are examples of this.

If it would make an interesting blog post, I’m all about it.  Unfortunately, I’ve gotten numerous requests for something that I don’t think would make a very interesting project/blog post, so I’m addressing it briefly here to help those who would like to make it for themselves.

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Details on the Radial Display

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So, last night I posted a video cataloging my creation of a radial spinning disk display (that’s what I’m calling it anyway). It’s not really a new concept or anything, and wasn’t particularly hard to make. That’s why it was the perfect candidate for the video which I think turned out rather well.

I was so excited about finishing the video, that I decided to post it before I had a proper writeup.  That’s what this post is for.

Because you can find details on how a radial spinning disk display (or “hard drive clock“) works all over the place, I thought I’d make this sort of a “meta” post and try to catalog not only the project but all of the design decisions (right and wrong) that I made along the way.  If you’ve been bored stiff by my super technical posts recently, this should be a welcome departure.  I made sure to include tons of photos.

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Super Rapid Prototyping a Radial Hard Disk Display Proof of Concept

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So, a friend and I were discussing hard drive clocks Tuesday afternoon, and I somehow got it in my head that I had to build something similar that evening.

I had enough supplies lying around to pull it off, and confident that I could, I decided to do a fun little video.  Ironically, it took longer for me to edit this video than to make the display. Details on the project here.

Dimming an EL panel is harder than it looks

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So, this is a project that was nearly a month in the making.  I set out to make a sound-reactive EL panel but found that driving EL in such a way is actually kind of difficult.  If you’ve been following the blog, I’ve been working on this project in one way or another since my transformers article, and it’s actually the reason I wrote that article.

Again, a disclaimer. There are over 8,000 words in this post that document all of my design decisions on this project.  It is not a how-to guide, but if you have some background in EE, I hope that you gain something from it.

Without further ado, let’s get down to business.

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Help

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Hi, I’m hoping you’d be able to help me on a project I’m doing?

For a concert I’m attending, I really want to have a leather jacket that has LED lights going down both arms, and the spine. I’ve got absolutely no knowledge in wiring or anything to do with circuits, but if simple enough, I can learn.

I’ve found the LED light strips on EBay, the only problem with them, they’re not run by battery. If there is absolutely anyway you could explain how to make the lights battery powered, that a person with minimal knowledge could understand, I would be so greatful!

I would buy something similar to this: <link>

And put it down a jacket like this:

<link>

Cheers

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