Well, the second matrix for my LED message board arrived today!

It took a little change in the code to get it working with two matrices, but now it rocks!

Check out the video of it in action:

At the same time I got my new brush/scourer, I also got four 16-tray storage containers which were some £2/ea and looked ideal for holding all my parts, which had grown out of hand in the previous containers.

I quickly loaded them up and just got around to ...

So I created a PCB for the Space Experiment mockup.

It's functionally identical to the breadboarded version but is its own PCB, looks a lot better and has some text on it.

It actually took three tries to get it right. The first time, it all worked nicely and ...

So, I'm part of a team entering the UK Space Experiment Competition, and basically our proposal won out and is now one of six final proposals around the country! This is great stuff but we wanted to put on a display at a stand at a fair someplace, and ...

I still had 80 LEDs left after my attempt at charlieplexing, so I decided to find another use for some of them.

That turned out to be soldering 40 of them together and sticking them to my wall!

They actually light up my room fairly well:

For now, they are ...

I recently ordered 100 blue LEDs from eBay for a measly £1 (plus p&p of something like £3). To my surprise, they are both bright and all functioning!

However, I hadn't really thought through what to do with them.

This was when I found a link to the ...

It's hardly original, but I thought I'd have a go at drawing stuff in the air using LEDs. I whipped up some "drawies" using a button cell and an LED with a little piece of plastic, such that the LED activates when I press down on it.

I ...

At the same time I etched the LED Firefly prototypes, I did some breadboard ICSP adapters. I've been working with ATtiny13s a lot recently, and they are a pain to program while breadboarding, so these seemed like just the thing.

It has a 6pin ICSP plug on top, and ...

I've got the second prototype made for my LED Firefly idea. This one uses all through-the-hole components, compared to the entirely surface mounted first prototype.
I did this for a few reasons:

• I have far more through-the-hole RGB LEDs than surface mounted, and they're brighter to boot
• I ...

I've been planning to improve on my current etching solution (namely, waving PCBs around in a bowl of ferric chloride for ten minutes) and the easiest route seemed to be a bubble etch tank.

Put simply, this is a tank containing etchant, some sort of aeration device, usually a ...