dmtaub - Slashdot User

Submission + - Arduino based high powered LED lights over WiFi (youtube.com)

Submitted by Gibbs-Duhem on Thursday November 18, 2010 @04:36PM

Gibbs-Duhem writes: This awesome video was produced by some MIT Engineers recently. They've started a fully open-source, open-hardware high power LED lighting project that they designed to be modular enough to control with the Arduino (or any other control system)! Using their open-source firmware, you can set up the Arduino to connect to WiFi and receive Open Sound Control packets. Then, they went further and released open-source software for PureData and Python to do music analysis and make the lights flash brilliantly in time with the music! A full Instructable was also posted in addition to the existing documentation for design and assembly on their website, http://saikoled.com

Submission + - MIT Engineers release Open Source LED Lighting (saikoled.com)

Submitted by Gibbs-Duhem on Thursday November 18, 2010 @01:06AM

Gibbs-Duhem writes: Four MIT Engineers, Brian Neltner (covered previously on slashdot for his work at http://led-artwork.com/ ), Daniel Taub, Perry Hung, and Russel Ryan, have in their spare time taken it upon themselves to produce an open-source, flexible, modular, and extremely high power LED light based on custom open hardware, and designed to make it easy for hobbyists to start using high power lighting in their projects. The "Saiko5" ( http://saikoled.com/saiko5/ ) is documented from circuit design and assembly all the way to case design and control software, and is all released under creative commons and GPL licenses.

The fixture they designed outputs over 800 lumens of focused LED lighting. It is controllable entirely over WiFi and is based around either an Arduino ( http://arduino.cc/ ) or a Maple ( http://leaflabs.com/devices/maple/ ) along with their open-source and open-hardware Light Shield ( http://saikoled.com/lightshield ). The firmware developed by these engineers uses the Open Sound Control ( http://www.opensoundcontrol.org/ ) protocol, a successor to the popular MIDI and DMX control schemes.

On the software side, the Saiko5 has fully open-source Python ( http://www.python.org/ ) example scripts which can be used as a backend to allow any software running on the computer to control the lights with simple commands such as "flash". At a higher level, they have also released an example audio analysis patch using the open-source version of Max/MSP known as PureData ( http://puredata.info/ ). The result is a variety of awesome videos showing the interaction of the LED light fixture with music which are posted at http://saikoled.com/applications/ .

The authors also posted a handy Instructable ( http://www.instructables.com/id/Ultra-bright-LED-Color-Changing-Spotlight-using-Op/ ) with step-by-step instructions for how to construct one of these light fixtures!

KDE Developers Discuss Merging Libraries With Qt 196

Posted by samzenpus on Sunday October 31, 2010 @06:24PM from the merge-ahead dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A proposal has been brought up with KDE developers by Cornelius Schumacher to merge the KDE libraries with the upstream Qt project. This could potentially lead to KDE5 coming about sooner than anticipated, but there's very mixed views on whether merging kdelibs with Qt would actually be beneficial to the KDE project, which has already led to two lengthy mailing list talks (the first and second threads). What do you think?"

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