This is the place to flaunt your cool creations and receive praises from your peers
I don’t know about you, but I love to see what other designers are getting up to both professionally and personally. These days, apart from the occasional consulting gig, I rarely do engineering work for professional purposes myself. Instead, I spend my days sweating over a hot (and sticky) keyboard, often writing about how hard engineering used to be when I was a lad.
On the other hand, I always have multiple hobby projects on the go. These projects often involve more than their fair share of tricolored light-emitting diodes (LEDs). As I always say: “Show me an LED flashing and I’ll show you a man drooling.”
My projects vary from being eye-wateringly complex and totally over-engineered (over-engineering is one of the things I do best, so I’m playing to my strengths) to relatively simple but highly effective. A couple of years ago, for example, I created a 12×12 array of ping pong balls, each containing a tricolored LED. I’ve since employed this little scamp to display all manner of things, such as Conway’s Game of Life. This has proved to be an eye-catching piece that never fails to attract “Oohs” and “Ahhs” from visitors to my office.
Earlier today, I saw some awesome YouTube videos on how to create mindboggling marble runs (https://bit.ly/499jt8b). Now I’m envisaging creating such a run using glass marbles that are illuminated from beneath the track using… you guessed it… tricolor LEDs.
But it’s not all about me (it should be, but it’s not), so I’ve decided to kick-off a new DENA feature called “Designer’s Corner.” This will be a 1-page column featuring a designer like you and your project. It doesn’t matter if this is a hobby or work creation, just so long as it’s cool and it makes me exclaim “Ooh” and “Ahh” (with bonus points if it includes any flashing LEDs).
What say you? Are you up for the challenge? If so, drop me an email and we’ll set the ball rolling (did you see what I just did there?).
max@designing-electronics.com
