Project Update

Well after Tom-Tom and Diana visited last weekend I now have the remainder of my tools and such so I'll be working on the Parallel Port LCD project this weekend. It seems like I'll probably need to power the display and backlight from the 9V battery anyway because the parallel port could be damaged if my math is wrong, and I don't wanna risk ending this project early cause I cooked the port!

More to come later I hope....

Mood Lighting

This is a quick sketch I made up of a circuit to power and control a Red, Green and Blue LED with varying brightness. The processor at the core is an ATtiny2313 from Atmel. It will accept three numbers over a serial link and use that to set the brightness of the corresponding LED using PWM and 2N2222 signal transistors. The LEDs will be housed in a diffuser plastic to blend the colors and allow you to select a number of colors across the RGB palette based on some kind of numerical input like temperature, stock price, ambient noise level, etc. This circuit is more of a proof of concept idea to see if I can have the effect I want. It's not really suitable for powering/controlling multiple sets of lights away from the base station. Please comment and tell me what you think of the idea and the design and such. And I realize the design is probably flawed and needs more work, I whipped this up this afternoon on a whim, it is far from done.