GSM

I finished another LED project last week. It's sort of a companion piece to the one I made last year, "Who's Afraid of Foxfire"

That one just used plain red LEDs. But I got me some neato fabbo color-changing LEDs and was itching to use them for something. Here's what they look like:



There is an integrated circuit and 3 separate diodes built into the lens. One is red, one blue, and one green. When the LED receives power, the IC divvies it up between the three separate diodes in a cycling pattern, thus fiddling with the RGB mix.


So this time around I was feelin' me some owl. Just felt like an owly night when I started.



I started with a piece of scrap plywood and sketched the owl, then started burning the sketch into the wood with my woodburning iron. 



Drilled his eyes out in prep for the LEDs.





Started painting him up. Also, I ended up hating the sketched beak, so I drilled out that part of the wood and made a 3D beak out of clay.



I also started making him a bit 3D all over. I used my Dremel to gouge out and shape down certain part of him, like his ear tufts and eye sockets.



After testing out a bunch of different things, I decided on this to make his eyes:



The inside part to a RX bottle cap. It was the perfect size and had a cool shape and, most importantly, I had two available.

So here it is just about finished, with the eyes glued in place. To make the pupils, I used a hole punch to cut perfect circles out of electrical tape. Then I coated the eyes with epoxy to give them a glassy look.



Here's my test circuit for the LEDs:



My intention for making it with independent switches was so that you could turn them both on at once, or one at a time. That way you could view both eyes changing colors in sync with each other, or crazily changing colors in different patterns.

Unfortunately, I found that no two LEDs of this type had exactly the same pattern time. That is, one would always go through its pattern a little quicker than the other, thus messing up the synchronization. Disappointing, but oh well. Not a huge deal.

Here's the back, with everything in place:



Behind the eyes, I glued in a bit of styrofoam to diffuse the LED light some. Without diffusion, you could see the LEDs through the plastic eyes, which sort of ruined the effect.

Some color variations when turned on:



And here's a video of it. At first with the LEDs basically in sync, then with one eye reset to break the sync.

Last edited by weatherfish (2009-07-17 00:02:24)