Light Ornament

I always had the idea of doing something with plexiglass and some fancy light. When I came across some full color LEDs, I had to make something with them.

The idea was to engrave some text into a plexiglas sheet and light it from the sides.
The color of the LED would then change randomly to create a "never look the same" look .

I had some ideas about how to get the color to change but when I found some source code (for a PIC microcontroller) that did almost the same as what I was looking for one of my problems was solved.

Using that software as a base I changed the original hardware design to what I needed and created the first prototype.

The priciple:

The main component is a PIC12C508 micro controller. This controller will drive a buffer transsistor to enable multiple LEDs to be driven. Each LED consist out of 4 seperate LEDs in one package (1 red, 1 green, 2 blue).
The micro controller will control intensity of the LEDs by using Pulse Width Modulation.
This will procuce a nice smooth transistion between the colors.

Here some pictures of some of the colors it can create.

	Mpeg movie (2 min) 7MB