Glowing Ball

A simple project that a friend asked me to make for her to fit into her show.  Basically she wanted a glowing ball that would mimic the breathing light that apple computers have.  Going from a dollar store glow ball to a breathing ball was relatively simple, taking an ATiny micro and a LED RGB chip with built in controller and slapping it all together on some perf board.

Here's what you get for a couple dollars from the Dollar Store:

What you probably can't see is the extreme amount of corrosion on the wires or the fact that there is no insulation on anything.  If that LED were to drop down and short across that nut (yes, it is just a nut glued in there) there is a chance for a fire.  Personally, I will never buy anything cheap from china anymore, it's just too scary what they will do over there.

After modifying the design and adding in my perf board hack we have:

Not bad.  Coating everything real well with hot glue to ensure nothing can come loose and cause a short the final product is this:

The circuit and code is hosted here on github, feel free to do with it as you please.  One thing that needs to be changed is adding a 5V boost regulator to keep the voltage constant, as the RGB led chip turns more and more red as the voltage droops lower.  As red less generally have lower forward voltage drops, my assumption is that the other LEDs are getting less current and thus the red colouring.

Tags: Circuits, Electronics, Lighting