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Subject: 
Homemade LED Bricks
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Fri, 12 Nov 1999 00:05:10 GMT
Viewed: 
681 times
  
Hi all,

I like the Mindstorms gear a lot, but I've always felt a proper lookin robot
needs lights, preferably multi-coloured and blinking. Unfortunately all the
Mindstorms kit has is a single light sensor.
So I've decided to build my own lights. I've used LED's. These things are
very cheap and use only a small amount of power. They are available in red,
green, yellow orange and blue and in many sizes. The blue ones are expensive
though.

I hollowed out some 2x4 bricks and drilled a hole in the side. Put the LED
through the hole and apply a drop of glue. Connect the LED through an
appropriate resistor to a 2x4 electric plate and glue the electric plate to
the bottom of the brick. That's it.
Connect the LED brick to one of the output ports of the RCX (or use another
9v power source).

Interesting option: You can use bicoloured LEDs. Control the colour by
setting the appropriate direction on the motor port.
Another option: You can also buy LEDs that blink.

Pictures:

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/agerstel/homemade_led_bricks.html

The black one is a red/green bicolour brick. The white ones produce blue
light.

BTW, the blue LEDs produce just about the right colour for fusion drives on
space ships......

This has probably been done before. Still, I'd like comments and
suggestions.

Enjoy,

Arjen



Message has 3 Replies:
  RE: Homemade LED Bricks
 
(...) not being an electronic engineer, what is "appropriate"? D. (25 years ago, 12-Nov-99, to lugnet.robotics)
  Re: Homemade LED Bricks
 
(...) [snip] The light pipe dohingus in the "Extreme Creatures" add-on, Space Shuttle Technic kit and a few others does this very nicely, it even adds a rotating display to the works. Its one of the few cool things in the Extreme Creatures expansion (...) (25 years ago, 12-Nov-99, to lugnet.robotics)
  Re: Homemade LED Bricks
 
I've made a few LED 'bricks, and am about to make some more like "Flashing towers" with some of the ??name?? tapered cones and transparent small round tops. 330 Ohms is my pick; plenty bright at about 20 Ma for most LEDs and dims nicely with "Set (...) (25 years ago, 15-Nov-99, to lugnet.robotics)

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