Category: Original Project Video Series

13 Ideas for LED Diffusion

This is a list of my favorite LED diffusion ideas, which I hope will provide you with some sparks of inspiration for creating your own next-level illumination. Examples and links are provided for each!

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Hard Drive Shelf

A shelf for my drives! Take a peek behind my computer, and you’ll find a stack of external hard drives and a mess of cables. I keep a piece of fabric in front of this area to help keep dust out, but it’s far from perfect and takes up a lot of horizontal desk space.

My goal with this project is to free up this space while creating a new safe home for my drives, where they could get fresh air without clogging up their fans with sawdust or anything else.

Leather Wallet

Here’s how I created a leather wallet with solar-etched detailing. The simple four-piece design is one of my first leatherworking projects, and took a few afternoons to complete. I learned all the techniques for this project from the free Instructables Leatherworking classes (beginner & intermediate).

For this project, you will need:

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

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3D Printed Glowing Flower

Create a fun light-up flower using 3D printing and Tinkercad! Optionally add some needle felting to diffuse the light from the LED at the center of the flower. The special Glow circuit assembly in Tinkercad makes it easy to put an LED and battery circuit into your 3D prints.

If you’d like to make the exact flower shown, you can download the attached STL files and get printing. You can modify the base model by clicking the “edit in 3D” button on the embedded Tinkercad model above (free Tinkercad account/login required). Or model your own unique flower in a new Tinkercad workplane using the tips in this tutorial.

flower-base-and-pedals.zip

Gather Supplies

You’ll need a 3D printer and filament to build this project. If you’re new to 3D printing, check out Jonathan Odom’s excellent free Instructables Easy 3D Printing Class to get you up to speed.

Supplies and tools list:

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

IMPORTANT: Coin cell batteries can cause serious injury if swallowed. Keep coin cell batteries out of reach of small children!

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Glowing LED Gummy Candy

Let’s make glowing gummy candies that look like LEDs! The recipe for gummy candy is simple, the legs are 3D printed, and the special ingredient to make the candies glow under blacklight is vitamin B2 powder.

For this project, you will need:

As an additional experiment, we’ll add real surface mount LEDs to the inside of some of the candies.

Warning! Coin cell batteries can cause serious injury if swallowed. Keep coin cell batteries out of reach of small children!

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Knife Sharpening Angle Coach

in collaboration with Alex French Guy Cooking!

Precision sharpening skills aren’t developed overnight! Here’s a high-tech way to monitor your knife angle during sharpening, with the help of an absolute orientation sensor and bluetooth microcontroller.

This is an intermediate level Arduino project, so if you’re an ultra-beginner or a bit rusty, brush up with my free Arduino Class.

Pick up the following components (find them in an Adafruit wishlist or from Amazon affiliate links below):

Tools you’ll need:

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

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GH5 Foot Pedal Shutter Remote

I do a lot of tabletop overhead photography featuring both of my hands, and a foot pedal shutter remote is an absolute must-have! Although it’s possible to modify the commercially available GH series remote to add a foot pedal, I wanted to create a more streamlined solution. The GH5 remote has a few resistors in it, which makes it a bit more involved to DIY than, a Canon shutter remote, for example. I looked it up, and sure enough, the switch contact is held high at about 41.1K ohms, and the shutter triggers when the switch brings it down to about 2.2K ohms. Resistor values add up when put in series, and some experimentation shows you can successfully deviate a bit on the resistor values (try what you have that’s close).

For this project, you will need:

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

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LED Mason Jar Lanterns

In this easy 3D printing project, we’ll build glowing mason jar lanterns containing a simple LED and battery circuit. Download my file or build your own custom lid using the Glow Circuit Assembly in Tinkercad, which is designed to hold the battery and LED together perfectly. I’ll show you four different ways to style your lanterns using materials you probably already have around.

This is a beginner project that’s great for students/educators. Let’s begin!

For this project, you will need:

  • Mason jar(s) in size(s) of your choice (quart, pint, 4oz)
  • 10mm LED(s) in color(s) of your choice
  • CR2032 batteries
  • Wire cutters/snips
  • 3D printed lid with embedded Glow Holder in size(s) to match your jar(s)
  • Paper & scissors, glitter glue, translucent beads, etc. for decorating your jar
  • Calipers or a ruler (optional, for designing your own lid)

Make a copy of my Tinkercad file (free account/login required). The two sizes match the common mason jar lid sizes. Export the one(s) that match your jar(s) and send them to your 3D printer. I used Autodesk Print Studio to prepare the printer file and set it to 20% infill with no raft or supports. If you prefer to design your own lid, skip ahead to the design step.

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

Mason-Jar-LED-Lantern-Lids.zipDownload
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Social Stats Tracker for Twitter, Instagram, Instructables

Frame your followers! Here’s how to build a social media stats tracker display using the a wifi arduino-compatible ESP8266 microcontroller board and several seven-segment displays. This project is an extension of my YouTube Subscriber Counter project, but uses one “brain” to track and display multiple networks. Easily omit the left (large digits) displays for any stat under 10k to bring the cost of components down.

Before attempting this project, you should be generally familiar with uploading new programs to your Arduino board and installing code libraries, both of which you can learn for free in my Arduino Class, though you really don’t have to understand much of the actual Arduino code to get this project running.

For a more in-depth introduction to the ESP8266 board (and its installation and setup), check out my free Internet of Things Class.

Supplies

For this project, you will need the following materials:

and the following tools:

To keep up with what I’m working on, follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and subscribe to my newsletter. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases you make using my affiliate links.

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YouTube Subscriber Counter With ESP8266

Version 2 of my YouTube Subscriber counter is here and it goes to eleve– I mean 99999999!

I was inspired by the Play Button awards YouTube sends out for subscriber milestones and built this circuit to display my realtime subscriber count using an ESP8266 wifi board and seven-segment display. I built this one to celebrate surpassing 10k subscribers, so this is an upgrade to my previous counter, which only supports counts up to 9999. Personalize the code to work with your channel! For tracking other social media stats, check out my multi social tracker project.

Before attempting this project, you should be generally familiar with uploading new programs to your Arduino board and installing code libraries, both of which you can learn for free in my Arduino Class, though you really don’t have to understand any of the actual Arduino code to get this project running.

For a more in-depth introduction to the ESP8266 board (and its installation and setup), check out my free Internet of Things Class.

For this project, you will need the following materials:

and the following tools:

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