Category Archives: Arduino

“Breathing” Sleep LED

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I always have loved Apple and their non-jerky, fluid like GUI in all of their OS’s. Then I noticed it even with their hardware when I got my MacBook Pro over 3 years ago. My older PC’s always had a flashing sleep LED. That was fine until I saw the “breathing” LED pattern that Apple did on the Mac products. Much nicer. 🙂 I saw these awesome cufflinks with the same “breathing” pattern, and got inspired to write a little Arduino sketch to replicate it. So I did.

LED to pin 11, that all.

This is a really simple sketch, only one thing I did was vary the timing in the fade to smooth out the take off and landing. You will see that in all of the if statements inside the dimming function.

You can download the sketch here.

Bench lights (LED’s, CCFL’s, and a little overkill..)

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OK, so about a year or so ago, I was working at my bench and I could not quite see what I was doing. I needed more light! I got so mad, I built this in about a half a day, and fixed the problem. Now I have enough light even when working on tiny things with magnifiers on my head.

I now have 4 white 12″ CCFL tubes, 6 1 watt warm white LED’s, 144 cool white LED’s (in strips), and 12 5mm diffused white LED’s under the bench pointed at the floor (did you ever drop anything?). All the LED’s are ramped on and off with PWM dimming as you will see in the video above. I also have 2 more channels available with full PWM dimming. Running everything wide open will allow you to see very well, and only consumes 17 watts.

A little overkill, but I was really frustrated. And hey, who just wants a plain ole boring switch anyway? Not me…