[rescue] Was: SGI Challenge L Now: LEDs

[Ethan O'Toole]

> How many smart people are involved in the "lights under the car" craze???
> Just curious... ;^)

I've actually always liked the Neon kits. They like most things are
illegal in the state of Virginia, so it is rare that you see them.

I came about it by accident. I was looking into the LED kits to use them
as lighting, as they are cheap on eBay but I had no idea as to the color
temperature and all that.

Then I stumbled onto this system from a UK vendor that uses a serial data
bus to each one of the LED bars, and appears to have independenet
addressing of all the LEDs. Pretty wild.

Then I started talking to the guy that sells them, and he agreed to sell
me a failed kit -- one where someone let the wires hit the exaust and it
grounded out. So my entire intentions are to "redo" the electronics and
make it emulate the $900 one from the UK people, in some manner.

It is illegal in my state, and more of a "just to do it" and one-up all
the non-geeks. I am into lights and such, having 4 intellabeams (the
lights they use in pro clubs) and some other misc. Actually, I JUST GOT
BACK from a gig! Both of them failed. Haha. Laser stuff had problems,
notebook computers had problems, by the time the night was over even the
controller was throwing out a POST error code. Sheesh.

The LED thing kind of came up after I was talking to some other locals
about building a persistance of vision imager LED bar...

There are some crazy projects out there. Check this one out:
http://sub-zero.mit.edu/fbyte/projects/

That guy works for that company who's name escapes me, they make quite a
bit of crazy LED based light products. Check out his projects, wild stuff
(64 LED projects to us seem very costly, this guy must have real hookups).

http://www.schardt.org/
Check out Spin....

there is also the fanscreen, basically a ceiling fan that plays graphics
you download into it... oh, full animiation even.

Wierd stuff.

Someone has a display that works by spinning a few bars of LEDs in a huge
cylinder.

I had the idea that it might be possible to do a volumetic display
similiar to the older TI laser based ones:

http://lasers.757.org/gallery/ira/i1-cylinder2.JPG

That belonged to Uncle Ira's Farm O' Death. Lasers draw the image on the
spinning thing.

Okay, enough to keep people busy.

Although, now you all have me looking to replace all of the lights in the
house with CF ones :-)


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