A South African pilot appears to have taken the name of his MacBook Air a little too literally, managing to drop it from the light aircraft he was flying when the canopy flew open. The MacBook, along with his flying license and logbook, fell 1000 feet into the fields below–but amazingly survived the experience.

the unibody casing was bent, the glass trackpad shattered and the cooling fans were damaged, but the screen remained intact and the MacBook continues to work …

[Akhil Stanislavose] wanted to spice up his window decorations for the holidays. Inspired by blinkenlights, he decided to make his front window interactive. The Blinken Window is a grid of 6 x 10 programmable LEDs running on a Raspberry Pi. Since a RasPi doesn’t have enough GPIO pins for 60 LEDs, [Akhil] built an expander board using 8 daisy chained standard 74HC595 shift registers to accommodate them.

[Akhil] demonstrates how you can use the Blinken Window to play a version of Pong using your smartphone as the controller. [Akhil] has also provided a few basic animation examples that can be expanded upon. We’d enjoy seeing an implementation of Tetris.

https://github.com/akhilstanislavose/blinken-window/blob/master/README.md

I chose Adafruit NeoPixels as the filler because they are individually addressable and easy to use (see edges of sculpture in sidebar photos). 70 meters of Neopixels in 28 addressable strips are controlled from an Arduino Mega/Due combo (see photo in sidebar). The controller talks over RS-485 to the Sensacells, using their API to request sensor states. A big lookup table associates NeoPixels with neighbouring sensors. The colors (both idle & triggered state) are set by external dials.

To get this working was more complicated than I expected, especially in terms of communication and power distribution.

Arduino LED controller shield makes complex RGB LED lighting apps a snap
http://www.edn.com/electronics-products/electronic-product-reviews/other/4437992/Arduino-LED-controller-shield-makes-complex-RGB-LED-lighting-applications-a-snap?_mc=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20141222&cid=NL_EDN_EDT_EDN_today_20141222&elq=6e519767ea0c4b1e8b1f3757509132a3&elqCampaignId=20832

The Arduino-compatible lighting RGB LED lighting shield reviewed here was designed to give designers a low-cost easy-to-use open-source platform for fast prototyping and inexpensive evaluation of multiple LED light engines. It is based on a XMC1202 MCU which integrates an ARM Cortex-M0 processor and a dedicated Brightness & Color Control Unit (BCCU) core. The BCCU contains 3 independent dimming engines with 9 independent Pulse Density Modulated (PDM) channels. Due to space limitations on the PCB, the shield only provides access to 1 dimming engine and 6 channels. The shield includes an I2C bus which the MCU uses to communicate with a host controller. The shield’s reference firmware supports 10 basic sets of commands which can be used alone or in combination to produce a wide range of lighting effects.