blinkm

With the great help of ThingM, the Legend Performance Cheer box is the next generation of Cheerleading equipment. Using injection molded ABS and a collapsible design, the Legend cheer box gives you minimal weight and high performance all packaged into a highly portable and easy to carry accessory. This box has gone through two other versions that focused on collapsibility and safety. But the real innovation takes place with the use of LEDs. The legend box uses an array or LEDs on the face to give you customized graphics and animations. I consulted the help of Tod E. Kurt to help design and implement the the LED board. Running on the Arduino platform, strip LED lighting was reconfigured into a …

Owners of Makerbot 3d printers have discovered that adding BlinkM MaxMs their 3d printer is easy to do and gives their bot an extra cool feel.  This excellent mood lighting system by jetty is one of many examples of how to do this.  Other users are using MaxMs to indicate bot build status.  All you need is a BlinkM MaxM and some LED strip, both available in the Makerbot store. Makerbot Industries themselves like BlinkMs too.  At their CES 2012 booth, the display stands for their award-winning Makerbot Replicator utilized MaxMs and RGB LED strips too. (image from gizmag.com) If you’re curious about BlinkM MaxMs, here’s some more information.

We had some wonderful ThingM projects created this year – this is a small collection f some of our favorites! Starting with the upper right hand photo and going Clockwise:  BlinkM in “Books with Personality” created by Jisu Choi + Matt Kizu from Art Center; Mike Rivamonte’s Rocet Sculpures; “Cloud” Steven Madsen, Kevin Yien, Chris Niswander, Jordan Stoewsand-Kryscio, Mallory Baran and Michael Theodore; “Current: Technology+Contemporary Claycraft” by: Virginia Pfau MFA Ceramics Candidate, School for American Craft, Rochester Institute of Technology; “And, Per Se” by artist Shanon Ebner.

A little while back we introduced Mike’s wonderful sculpture “Scout”, which has been recently published in Spectrum 18: Best of Fantastic Art which will hit stores in  December.  His current  work has integrated our ThingM FreeMs to assist in lighting his rockets.  Each piece is hand constructed and painted and lit with FreeMs and a 9V wall wart.  This is a limited production and and are priced at $1,500 each.  This sounds like a wonderful and unique holiday gift! To view more of Mike’s work and to contact him regarding any questions please visit his website: www.mrivamonte.com/

Alex Ladner built a Deadmau5 costume head for his Halloween costume, putting a MinM into each eye and programmed them using the LinkM. Using the pre-made script that fades from color to color with a final result was both bright and awesome. He won multiple costume contests and looks forward to using more MinMs for next years costume!  

  Shannon Ebner’s work centers on a do-it-yourself alphabet of handmade letters and signs temporarily placed—and strategically displaced— in public contexts. The artist sets language in the service of photography, her cryptic messages captured and fixed in black-and-white photographs. Populating actual yet uncertain landscapes or mise-en-scènes including California real estate sites, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Washington Monument, these ephemeral signs spell out such darkly ambiguous phrases as “Landscape Incarceration,” “The Doom,” and “The Day—Sob—Dies.” Ebner recently created a piece tittle “And, Per Se” for the Venice Biennale and included her Light Box pieces in her current UCLA Hammer show.  We’re happy to say she was able to use  ThingM MaxMs for the lighting component of her work! …

The Teapotty is a teapot sitting on a servo which takes readings from a magnetometer which is influenced by neodymium magnets in a cup.  The magnetometer takes the reading from the north position, plays a bit of something similar to the Tetley Tea tune and then moves to a new position – where the teacup moves to. BlinkM RGB LEDs indicate the new position of the teapot by changing colour based on the teapot’s new position from 0-180 degrees. I made some polymorph diffuser covers for them & also added heart confetti to emphasise the feeling of heartwarming happiness a cup of tea can bring! To read the the artists own reads please visit:  http://rainycatz.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/teapotty-electronic-teapot-exploration-for-chi-tek-at-the-va/

Sketching and Hardware 2011 This year was the sixth annual Sketching in Hardware summit on toolkits for exploring interaction design with digital hardware that Mike annually organizes and that ThingM sponsors. This years’ event took place in the amazing Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, PA. You can see who attended and download many of the presentations from it here: http://www.sketching11.com/presentations/

Project: LED Glass Desk By: Mike LaGrasta first posted on Instructables Mike LaGrasta first posted on Instructables After being given a frosted glass top desk at work, I thought it would be cool to set up some led powered visual notifications. I coded up a crude NodeJS server to listen for incoming events and a Growl “notification style” to send commands to some BlinkM lights. What I used: * Ikea Galant desk * Custom Software (available on GitHub.com at https://github.com/mnlagrasta/DeskLights ) * Growl Software * 8 BlinkM RGB LEDs from ThingM * LinkM USB controller from ThingM * 9 IDC 5×2 Crimp Connectors * 10 feet of ribbon cable * 2 sheets of foam core * a bit of tape, twist ties, and …

Sometimes you just want a little extra light in a room. With RGB LED tape, you can put light anywhere. But controlling its brightness and making it the color you want is a bit harder. A BlinkM MaxM can easily control LED tape, either as a stand-alone device, with an Arduino, or your computer via a LinkM. Stand-alone mode is great if you want a specific color or color pattern (the BlinkMSequencer makes this really easy) For this installation, I added a FreeM to the MaxM to let you control the light with a standard infrared TV remote control. Another nice thing about the LED tape is that when it’s off, you can’t see where it’s installed. Here’s a video …