from the HexLed store; "I was selling about 4 kits a week, so keeping on top of the stock was easy. Then Big Clive released his video and I sold 46 kits in 2 hours and I have had to close the shop to catch up." I can't help but feel warm and fuzzy for buying out someone's shop. ^.^
Back when I was in college ('68-'72), I built a similar device with NE2 neon lamps across a unique hi voltage polyester capacitor with each cap/lamp in series with resistor. All of these were powered by a mains connected bridge rectifier on the USA 120 vzc power. The same random flashing of each neon lamp was mesmerizing. Also, in a dark room, the lamps could re-synchonize because the orange photons from any lamp could trigger nearby lamps optically. Much fun, then and now.
Back in my pro audio days, we used to put something called "LPD" on our equipment spec spreadsheets when comparing possible equipment choices. LPD = lights per dollar. If the rack was a show piece, high LPD equipment was sometimes chosen so the client felt like they were getting something for their money. The DSP boxes we often used had a single red.poweer.light on the front and weren't terribly interesting to the uninitiated.
That's just like having people go "I want those shoulder mount camera's, that looks good" while a much smaller one these days might be just as capable though yes you might see it in the resulting image when it comes to dynamic range when you knew what to look for. Best thing was when having hired 4 of those big ones and the job was over, you later heard the customer saw you at so many places due to having to move a lot with them (in a multi-camera setup for instance) they thought you were there with 6 of those camera's :P.
My Hexputer arrived a couple of weeks ago - plan to start assembling it this weekend. Probably with Big Clive's Patreon Weekend Stream playing as a mood enhancer.
13:47 Right hand side, first row of whites has one sticking way out. Also right hand row of reds has one wonky. Looks like you caught them before the finish though.
Haha, I was also yelling at the screen at this point. 4 from the back, second row from right at 13:53 shows a white one and on 5'th from back first row from right has a red one sticking out as well. That's the first time we see em.
Kinda funny because his right middle finger is touching the high red LED while talking about not finding any that are high at 13:51. D5 and D18 were standing quite high.
Some people can actually recall that old computers displayed their registers' state by lighting up corresponding bits on a panel and populated huge rooms with their circuitry. This is what influenced, I guess, the look of «supercomputers» in Sci-Fi movies, especially where blinking in the dark rhymed with sky full of stars.
I worked at a financial firm and someone they hired to do a brochure came around snapping pictures of the various departments. I had to escort the guy through our computer room and showed him our IBM mainframe. He appeared frustrated and finally asked if we would show him the "insides". He was expecting huge panels full of blinking lights just like a sci-fi show. Disappointment. Then he asked if I could make the workstation CRTs display any cool graphics. They were green monochrome 3191 "dumb" terminals, so no. We were a financial business and he was looking for LucasFilm or something.
As a dinosaur I completely approve of many LEDs for a proper computer, especially supercomputers of course. These are important and valuable Clivean projects.
If you drive multiple blinking LEDs from a single resistor, they will tend to blink in sync. It occurs to me that someone very clever could lay down runs of sync'd LEDs so as to cause specific shapes to appear.
Something along the lines of Clive's lamp with the neons that did the same thing, I was thinking of that myself. I wonder, what if you put two in series? Or two in parallel, then those parallel pairs in series? I dunno, there's all sorts of things you could do, stick resistors and capacitors in here and there just to introduce more needless complexity. Sadly though, chaos theory works best with large groups of identical units, the base layout should be as even and boring as possible, so that the tiniest differences end up producing the big results. When I imagined there might be a computer on there, I thought it'd be nice to do Game Of Life. But not Conway's rules necessarily, cos they're pretty sparse and boring and degenerate into nothing pretty quickly. But you can alter the rules so that any number of live neighbours causes birth and death, and get all sorts of interesting results. Maybe something like that, that on a timer randomly chooses a new rule. Actually back in the early days, Conway knocked up his own purpose built game-of-life machine, it used RAM and logic, I think, to read and compare the neighbours for each cell, without having to do it in software, so it was much faster. I think you'd interface it via serial to a normal computer, point being it could tear away at a decent sized grid much faster. I used to really want one, at one point, but now there's wristwatches could do it in software faster. Maybe an FPGA would be good for that. The tricky bit would be the addressing, though I once implemented GOL in software and came up with a couple of shortcuts, since for each new cell you evaluate, you already have some results left over from the previous one that are relevant.
I'd been wondering why not one resistor ... Have a lower voltage? Or is there something weird going on... Like the videos that are happening at the moment about a circuit that's speed of light related... Aerial Capacitor Inductance Circuit ... 🐱 ...
can probably write a script that figures it out relatively easily if that is indeed the case. i say script because a complex shape is likely goingto melt your brain and collapse your patience into a singularity.
@@mySeaPrince_ not _quite_ sure whether i understand your question correctly given the completely unrelated random words you sprinkled in there, but i _think_ you meant to ask why all the LEDs didn't share a single resistor? in that case the answer is: because then all the current will go through one big resistor (= it'll heat up way more), and also the fewer LEDs are on at the same time, the higher the current will be through those, possibly damaging them. the only way to prevent that would be to make the resistor such a high value it would protect a single LED, but then as soon as more LEDs are on the current across them individually becomes so low you can't see them anymore.
What if you added a photo resistor pointed at each LED, and a random web of traces on a middle layer connecting each photoresistor to another LED somewhere else on the board. You should end up with the frequency of each light's blinking shifting randomly around.
What I like about these super computers, in preference to for example, a Cray .... is the simplicity of adding more boards to greatly increase in computing power. And they are so much more compact. NCC-1701, Jupiter-2 and even HAL, has nothing on these.
One technique I use for when placing lots of LEDs is to line them up in the positive and negative rails of a bread board. Then I can test all the LEDs for matching brightness. Then when I go to put the LEDs into the PCB, I snip the LED standing in the bread board so I always know the polarity directly before placing it into the PCB. they stand up nicely in the bread board which is easier to snip, and also the legs are easy to clean up because they remain in the bread board until you pull them out.
I have had a MASSIVE fascination with LEDs that do things on their own (flash, fade, color change, etc.) for many years now, and this tickles all of those fascinations. Especially high amounts of them in one place. I think it all started with a flashy dragon I got a while ago with the blue/red flashers. Similar to what you showed, they all start on red then slowly become un synchronized. I could watch it flash (and those boards too) flash away all day! I love it!
@@Spiralem I very sincerely doubt that the external resistor has no effect on the blink rate. It's not like there's a microcontroller and a crystal oscillator in there, it's probably some sort of simple oscillator IC and a capacitor to hold the energy for each blink. The simplest circuit I can think of would literally just be a capacitor connected across the terminals of the LED, but a cap that small would flash too quickly on its own. I doubt it's much more complicated than a few transistors, but I honestly could be wrong.
Clive i am surprised that you didn't solder a micro usb socket to the back of the board so you save all the faf of cutting off the plug etc. Just an idea for future board designs. You did it on your LED driver board.
@@bigclivedotcom you need the straight on connectors like you find on gps units, surface mount on the backside of the board and the usb would come straight out the back of the frame add another footprint for a flush one and you're in business
Funny, I used to make these way back in the early 1990s when the blinky leds first came out. I used to make small 12v red versions in a bezel (still have one) for car dash boards before alarms were the norm, so it looked like you had a car alarm, and a thief would leave your car alone. Sold many hundreds (lost count) for $15 each. I bought thousands though, and noticed same effect, so also made large blinking panels from old populated pcbs, and sold them for hundreds of dollars as supercomputer tech art.
@13:53 or 833.83 seconds, top right corner, 1 column in, 4 down appears to be up by a few millimeters than the other LEDs. Maybe that case needs a little redesign to help maintain the same consistent pressure across the PCB and any components the foam is in contact with.
As a chronic dyspraxic I find his hands only videos fascinating...when he holds the solder between to fingers, the object to be soldered in one hand and the soldering iron in the other is a favourite. 👉💎👈
Absolutely love your supercomputers. Inspired by you, I've constructed a supercomputer for my son using ESP8266 and a P10 red LED array of 16x32 with some code that runs a server page that he uses to write a stream of characters on the array and then returns to the intergalactic computation after some time. He is very happy everyday. I love it every time when he uses it.
I don't think I have ever soldered that many joints without an error or few, typically a solder bridge or open joint hidden under flux. So readers shouldn't be dismayed if they have a few errors. Thanks, Clive, for another constructive project!
Most awful is when I have lane-PCB and for convenience I want to bridge lanes (for instance for a common ground from somewhere) and the solder is like "Nope!! I won't do that no matter how hard you try!" and when you need to avoid a lane or islands getting bridged solder is like "Here you go!" :P.
The hexaputer looks awesome. Too bad a kit isn't sold to make the "cube" version. I'm leaning towards the RGB kit rather than a solid color. It will look good with all the RGB in my new PC build.
@@BedsitBob If the person selling it supplies rgb leds then sure, if the kits are only sold in solid colors you might need to buy 3 (or leds from ebay)
@@BedsitBob No, the RGB LEDs (not currently available) can't be used for that since those RGB LEDs aren't controllable - they slowly cycle between colors. So you need three sets of different coloured random LEDs, and you probably want the "Slow" type which as Clive mentioned are not easy to get in small quantities except via these kits. Yes, sourcing the white solid diffused LEDs for the border wouldn't be hard but that's not where the problem lies, it means you "only" need 3 kits to build one instead of 4. Assuming the Etsy selller offered the colors you want or even has three different colour variants (it has 3 currently, but not the ones used in Clive's cube) - it varies depending on supply. OTOH if you want a solid or Fast blinking Cube it does mean you could buy just one kit and ignore the LEDs included (there's currently no "bare" kit). Not sure if the PCB layout files for it are available, but even if it is doing all the SMD resistors on the back will be a pain. Not that hard to do if you have a steady hand but will definitely take much longer to assemble. I suspect it would be a much better idea would be talk to the Etsy seller, he/she may well me willing to put up a Cube kit if asked. Or even offering a "bare" kit with just the circuit board and smd resistors already soldered.
@@BedsitBob For me, the idea of a "kit" means everything needed is included. None of the kits currently offer having a 2nd color to use for the cube edges, so I would have to source other LEDs separate from the kit. If I were to buy 4 kits of different colors, I could then mix-n-match the colors to make an edge color and have 3 colors for the sides. That could be repeated 2 more times, and the 4th would just be a mixture of the leftovers. In the end, with what is currently available, buying just 1 kit won't get me the "cube".
My dad did something similar to this, but with LEDs that do a slow RGB color fade. An acquaintance of ours who was a regular attendee of Burning Man had managed to get an old electric golf cart and wanted to give it a dreamy / etheral look, so my dad put a bunch of RGB color fade LEDs in parallel on some thin wire and powered it with an LM317 set to 3.5V. The ceiling was covered with a few layers of a thin decorative glittery fabric with the LEDs behind most of the layers. It made a cool subtle morphing effect across the while roof liner. I wonder if I can make that effect happen in a smaller footprint and make it look like a computer having dreams...
I also wondered what it would look like, it took a while to find a vid of some one doing it. watch?v=ywGKHMqYLTs?t=208 These might be too close together and the ISO was not set well on the camera . Still looked OK. The LEDs I used to have would go from slow fade to quick fade to blinking, wonder if that would produce an interesting effect .
So glad these are now available! Would love it if you made a video full length of you assembling a few of them and just rambling/answering questions 😁🤘
Hey big Clive, I've notice that you're rapidly approaching the million subscriber mark. Which means - strap yourself in and go for throttle up! You are going to have one hell of a ride to stardom! Good luck and enjoy the overview effect you deserve it!!
Finally, some solder work again. Love those, and my personal supercomputers (10 by 7 1.5hz mixed monolight LED, 10 by 7 RGB morphing) is fascinating everyone who enters my office. Is is so relaxing if you need to get your head free ...
When you talk about supercomputers as as effect, I can't help but think of how they depicted them back in the old Star Trek days. It involved multi-colored lights, moving discs, and a frosted lens, so that it made random swirling patterns. Rather reminiscent of the flame-effect device you posted recently.
I have so far completed and framed two 4x6 units, one with flicker flame candle style LEDs, and one with red/blue dual color alternating LEDs. I also completed and framed an A4 unit with the same red/blue LEDs. I will be working on a second A4 unit soon with red/green alternating LEDs for Christmas! Thanks for making the files available for us!
It's so good to have affordable electronics. When I was in college in the 80's, if you blew up components (especially EEPROMS) you got a real roasting for it. Worst I did was miswire a 8086 board and fried the processor ... and pretty much all the important stuff on the board ... I just put it back in the cupboard and got another one out. Next class must have taken the hit for it.
Very nice. Twenty years ago I built a star with blinking LEDs for Christmas. And I'm in the process of building a circuit board with 392 neon glow lamps. Each glow lamp will have a capacitor and two resistors and will thus switch itself on and off. One of the two resistors limits the discharge current of the capacitor, because otherwise the electrode material of the glow lamps will be sputtered away. For 12 years I have been running a test circuit to test the life of the glow lamps, so far everything has been fine. I would just have to continue soldering the 392 circuits to finish.
This reminds me of the disco light shows I built back in the early 80's. I used to put LEDS on The front panel of the electronics housing, representing the light show, so the dj could dial in a combination of effects. This was so satisfying.
The effect of holding the incomplete board in front of the working hexputer (about 22:01) and having the slow blinking leds shine through the pin holes in it is really nice. Maybe a 2 layer 'puter with the small fast green leds with lots of extra holes drilled in it in front of another board of slow blinking larger leds?
Hey man, I just wanted to say thank you. I acquired a Yihua iron a long while back (its fantastic. soldering is no longer a struggle) and my next stop is a cheap benchtop power supply. My electronic knowledge was very rudimentary before I started binging you a few years ago. So it's thanksgiving time here in the States, and I owe you a BIG one. This is fun.
Adverts to the Power of Clive... Evilution sells out, due to high demand .. Well done Clive, I will have to think of something else for my Christmas construction project..
I’ve actually used a computer with programmable blinking lights, and my software used them to show me progress of the computation. It was an Intel Hypercube with only 16 nodes, each node with several colored LEDs associated with it. So the use of self-flashers sort of rubs me the wrong way… not that I could necessarily tell except at startup. Obviously self-flashers are much more easy to use, and provide a much nicer effect than they have any right to.
Mine arrived a few weeks ago and just built it today after watching this video it took me about 4 hours 20 minutes as I don't have the circuit board holder, only had 1 led not work as I fitted backwards. I went for the fast flash pink LEDs and put a constant blue led boarder around it. I'm well happy with it.
It looks like there is one LED in an outside row (excluding the border row) that is not seated as well as the other LEDs. You can see it in the far right row at 13:49.
We used to have a through hole insertion machine at work. The components came on strips of paper tape on a reel. Typically the machine would load about 199 out of 200 LEDs without issue. Insertion failures would go flying violently. It had very few problems with resistors, and handled capacitors pretty well. These days we use all SMT components.
The SMD mini-supercomputers work very well off lithium ion batteries. I have one going on my desk now. An excellent use for "street lithium" salvaged from certain recreational devices. Use a BMS though. Some LEDs, esp red and amber, will stay lit below minimum safe voltage.
To make soldering easier on ground planes and thicker tracks the component pad attributes can be set to 'thermal break' before ground plane flood is applied. Although this is not done for high current component pins.
Awesome Clive, I was wondering how these worked. I had assumed a small AtTiny or some other microcontroller was driving the display, but then you said each LED has an oscillator the pennty dropped - it really is that simple?! On a different note, my mini supercomputer from mouse is *still* running months on from a little solar panel. I had a funky idea where I could add a small battery circuit and PIR sensor and drop the entire thing into epoxy "brick" and have a perfectly waterproof outdoor supercomputer!
This reminds me of watching a raster pattern on a CRT TV except a lot slower. I think it would be interesting to know how old SciFi TV shows and movies did these kind of effects.
The A4 board with non-blinking, higher-brightness (well, up to the current limit of the traces - an amp?) LEDs would make a fine "shadow-free" (well, soft-edged shadows, which is really the point) light panel for amateur videography!
Not sure about that, I have an old flashlight with a 4 x 15 array of white LEDs, the Terralux TLW-80, WorkStar 80, and the shadows from it have lots of very close overlapping edges. Looks artificial almost, like bad cgi? Each LED is causing its own edge on the shadow, basically. Diffused ones wouldn't do that, or maybe you'd have to put a diffuser over the whole thing, for a lighting panel.
Great work! I would also suggest adding a few more red LEDs in such a way that they form the edges of a perfect cube with blue flashing LEDs on its plane surfaces.
Burroughs 6000 computers had an arrray of red leds (very much like the mini supercomputer here in function) that did this and did not represent data activity. I saw them on a group being burned-in at Burroughs. I also saw a failed 9000 system laying on its side in a caged storage area, 'What's that' I asked, 'We don't talk about that' was the reply.
At a milspec soldering training (>25years ago) that cropping was called hoeing and strictly forbidden as that caused the lead ends not to be covered with solder and so could cause early corrosion…!🤣
I do love the hexputer, a lot. As for the A4, I really dig it. It reminds me of Mother's interface room on the Nostromo in the movie Alien. Very, very cool. But can they be carbonated?
Very Nice!!!! So Simple!!! A suggestion to the manufacturer... I noticed a distinct lack of holes near the cable connections for a strain relief. Two 1/8" or 9/64" holes right next to each other would make a great attachment for a 4" zip tie. Even one 9/64" hole would do, feed it through the single hole, around the wire, and back out, zipping to itself and the zip tie head holds it from going through the hole.
you convinced me that I just had to have one... so off to Amazon I went and ordered a combo of single, dual, and triple color fast and slow flashing leds for a total of 600 of them... plan to mount them in a sheet of lexan and spray paint the back side flat black... gonna be fun soldering the bus wires to the led legs and resistors... thinking of the design shape to be an ellipsoid...
I did mine over several evenings. I also replaced the outer ones with slow rgb which looks good especially early on when they are all one colour while the centre ones goes out of sync.
FYI, I have a hat which had a flasher LED in series with two regular LEDs and worked off a 9 volt. Worked quite well. I did a project which used six flasher LEDS with a six LED element (radio shack) and it simulated a fire quite nicely. This might be a neat thing to try in a 12 volt light up panel.
I saw a neat project back in the 1980s in radio electronics (or another) where someone did one of these panels but with counter chips (flasher LEDs not there yet) and made a neat altair looking panel, thing is he use an inverter on a couple LEDs so it never be fully dark
Very cool looking project! Wouldn't a blinking LED not actually require a current limiting resistor? I would think that the blinking circuit would take care of that at the same time??? (Still quite new to electronics, so any advice you guys can give would be appreciated....)
Direct across 5V the current could be quite high. Using separate resistors also reduces LEDs getting in sync, and also protects them during a reverse polarity incident.
@13:55 Got to love how the moment you say that there are no LED's sticking up there is one sticking up in position #18 near your right hand middle finger...LOL :)
Putting LEDS into a CNC drilled sheet of black PVC would be great. Pick your (round) LED diameter, glue them in get wiring/soldering. 3D printing might be a decide idea too but I'd do high in-fill, only do pilot holes to still gently drill the final LED holes.
I need to design one of these that fits into a 19" telecom rack. We reduced a huge amount of our data center into a dozen hypervisor hosts (so maybe 30-40 racks of stuff down to one) - would be nice for management to think there's still tons of work going on there.
@@Okurka. - I'm sorry, reading that REALLY hurts. I don't want to think of how far you had to cross your eyes to manage to put that level of German, Fake German, and puns together. At least there wasn't any Pig Latin.
@@Okurka. - that's one word, yes. das cottenpicken hander? 'das pockets'? 'rubbernecken'? .. all strung together? At least you didn't end up adding something like Abwasserbeseitigung. (Or maybe in defense of Arbeiterunfallversicherungsgesetz, or someone having backpfeifengesicht )
With the hex it’d be interesting to see if- by installing red leds in a Y across the centre to create the outline of a cube- and then a reflection of it and oscillation between the two if it might give the illusion of a rotating cube?
It is one of those things which look like, there is a sophisticated mind behind controlling it, but in fact it is just noise. Reminds me of the universe.
A project idea might be to have a multi-colour version of your channel logo for your live streams. It could sit above your head and have shimmering eyes and a shimmering beard? Alternatively, you could make a sign with the word 'live' underneath your logo maybe even featuring an electric blue lightning bolt. Awesome effects in this video and really simple to do.
Just to be pedantic, at 13.48 I noticed 1 LED appeared high, first white column 2 or 3 from the top 😁, I might gat one of the Hexputers just to get back into the flow of soldering as I am so out of practice now😁
Oh these are neat! They're giving me ideas for a new bike light. I don't like the regular blinking bike lights, and while I did build some real powerful non-blinking ones, I do find them boring. If car drivers can ride around with all sorts of aftermarket headlights (which are very much illegal around here, but the cops don't seem to care), I should be allowed to ride around with a pair of supercomputers on my bike.
Is it known what determines the blink period? For example if the period varies by LED you could rig up a microcontroller to measure current and use that to get a precise measurement of blink period. Do that with a bunch of them and line them up by blink period and I bet you'll get a cool chaser effect. Could be nice to combine with the more random look, maybe on the borders...
This just needs a prismatic lens over the top of it to make it period-appropriate. I had a toy as a kid which had flashing lights behind such a lens which made each one look like a starburst.
I don't miss soldering LEDs... Worked in a place years ago soldering, could do 4 thousand LEDs a hour... (Components placed already) I was unaware that blinking LEDs were available, got some ideas now.. Thanks for the video!
You should try an experiment where you have the hexaputer on a live stream, versus a static LED array of the same size. And see how it affects the file.
![[Live สด] การออกรางวัลสลากกินแบ่งรัฐบาล งวดวันที่ 16 ธันวาคม 2567](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dNTiBBthKgQ/mqdefault.jpg)
from the HexLed store; "I was selling about 4 kits a week, so keeping on top of the stock was easy. Then Big Clive released his video and I sold 46 kits in 2 hours and I have had to close the shop to catch up." I can't help but feel warm and fuzzy for buying out someone's shop. ^.^
In 2 days I eventually sold 80 kits and 55 plain PCBs. The postman looked a bit downtrodden when he had to pick them all up.
Me too but imagining the shop owner's initial panic attack 😳, makes me laugh a little. 😆
Where can I locate blue slow flash LED's?
@@evilutionltd Thanks for your work - I built mine over Christmas.
Could u use an opto coupler to create a real rng program?
Back when I was in college ('68-'72), I built a similar device with NE2 neon lamps across a unique hi voltage polyester capacitor with each cap/lamp in series with resistor. All of these were powered by a mains connected bridge rectifier on the USA 120 vzc power. The same random flashing of each neon lamp was mesmerizing. Also, in a dark room, the lamps could re-synchonize because the orange photons from any lamp could trigger nearby lamps optically. Much fun, then and now.
Back in my pro audio days, we used to put something called "LPD" on our equipment spec spreadsheets when comparing possible equipment choices. LPD = lights per dollar. If the rack was a show piece, high LPD equipment was sometimes chosen so the client felt like they were getting something for their money. The DSP boxes we often used had a single red.poweer.light on the front and weren't terribly interesting to the uninitiated.
That's so smart 😂 awesome
Der blinkenlights are an important factor.
That's just like having people go "I want those shoulder mount camera's, that looks good" while a much smaller one these days might be just as capable though yes you might see it in the resulting image when it comes to dynamic range when you knew what to look for.
Best thing was when having hired 4 of those big ones and the job was over, you later heard the customer saw you at so many places due to having to move a lot with them (in a multi-camera setup for instance) they thought you were there with 6 of those camera's :P.
I've always believed that if a device has lots of LEDs, the buyer thinks they are getting their moneys worth.
@@tonylock7657 that's just like the common knowledge that lot's of RGB fans in a computer makes it faster 😄
My Hexputer arrived a couple of weeks ago - plan to start assembling it this weekend. Probably with Big Clive's Patreon Weekend Stream playing as a mood enhancer.
@Tim M Hexputing.
@Tim M The real question is....
What don't they do?
13:47 Right hand side, first row of whites has one sticking way out. Also right hand row of reds has one wonky. Looks like you caught them before the finish though.
Haha, I was also yelling at the screen at this point.
4 from the back, second row from right at 13:53 shows a white one and on 5'th from back first row from right has a red one sticking out as well.
That's the first time we see em.
Kinda funny because his right middle finger is touching the high red LED while talking about not finding any that are high at 13:51. D5 and D18 were standing quite high.
Some people can actually recall that old computers displayed their registers' state by lighting up corresponding bits on a panel and populated huge rooms with their circuitry.
This is what influenced, I guess, the look of «supercomputers» in Sci-Fi movies, especially where blinking in the dark rhymed with sky full of stars.
don't forget Star Trek. Terribly high tech in the seventies. Remember when the Star Trek computer said "working" in that sexy female voice?
I worked at a financial firm and someone they hired to do a brochure came around snapping pictures of the various departments. I had to escort the guy through our computer room and showed him our IBM mainframe. He appeared frustrated and finally asked if we would show him the "insides". He was expecting huge panels full of blinking lights just like a sci-fi show. Disappointment. Then he asked if I could make the workstation CRTs display any cool graphics. They were green monochrome 3191 "dumb" terminals, so no. We were a financial business and he was looking for LucasFilm or something.
Honestly - this is my childhood in a screenshot … from Buck Rogers to most 70s and early 80s shows … I love it!!
Hope you’re doing well Clive!!
Computers, pre microchips and video terminals.
Twiki and Dr. Theopolis.
Biddy Biddy
As a dinosaur I completely approve of many LEDs for a proper computer, especially supercomputers of course. These are important and valuable Clivean projects.
If you drive multiple blinking LEDs from a single resistor, they will tend to blink in sync. It occurs to me that someone very clever could lay down runs of sync'd LEDs so as to cause specific shapes to appear.
Something along the lines of Clive's lamp with the neons that did the same thing, I was thinking of that myself. I wonder, what if you put two in series? Or two in parallel, then those parallel pairs in series? I dunno, there's all sorts of things you could do, stick resistors and capacitors in here and there just to introduce more needless complexity. Sadly though, chaos theory works best with large groups of identical units, the base layout should be as even and boring as possible, so that the tiniest differences end up producing the big results.
When I imagined there might be a computer on there, I thought it'd be nice to do Game Of Life. But not Conway's rules necessarily, cos they're pretty sparse and boring and degenerate into nothing pretty quickly. But you can alter the rules so that any number of live neighbours causes birth and death, and get all sorts of interesting results. Maybe something like that, that on a timer randomly chooses a new rule.
Actually back in the early days, Conway knocked up his own purpose built game-of-life machine, it used RAM and logic, I think, to read and compare the neighbours for each cell, without having to do it in software, so it was much faster. I think you'd interface it via serial to a normal computer, point being it could tear away at a decent sized grid much faster. I used to really want one, at one point, but now there's wristwatches could do it in software faster. Maybe an FPGA would be good for that. The tricky bit would be the addressing, though I once implemented GOL in software and came up with a couple of shortcuts, since for each new cell you evaluate, you already have some results left over from the previous one that are relevant.
I'd been wondering why not one resistor ...
Have a lower voltage?
Or is there something weird going on...
Like the videos that are happening at the moment about a circuit that's speed of light related...
Aerial
Capacitor
Inductance
Circuit
... 🐱 ...
can probably write a script that figures it out relatively easily if that is indeed the case. i say script because a complex shape is likely goingto melt your brain and collapse your patience into a singularity.
@@mySeaPrince_ not _quite_ sure whether i understand your question correctly given the completely unrelated random words you sprinkled in there, but i _think_ you meant to ask why all the LEDs didn't share a single resistor? in that case the answer is: because then all the current will go through one big resistor (= it'll heat up way more), and also the fewer LEDs are on at the same time, the higher the current will be through those, possibly damaging them. the only way to prevent that would be to make the resistor such a high value it would protect a single LED, but then as soon as more LEDs are on the current across them individually becomes so low you can't see them anymore.
What if you added a photo resistor pointed at each LED, and a random web of traces on a middle layer connecting each photoresistor to another LED somewhere else on the board. You should end up with the frequency of each light's blinking shifting randomly around.
What I like about these super computers, in preference to for example, a Cray .... is the simplicity of adding more boards to greatly increase in computing power. And they are so much more compact. NCC-1701, Jupiter-2 and even HAL, has nothing on these.
Don't forget the "Seaview" Submarine ;)
One technique I use for when placing lots of LEDs is to line them up in the positive and negative rails of a bread board. Then I can test all the LEDs for matching brightness. Then when I go to put the LEDs into the PCB, I snip the LED standing in the bread board so I always know the polarity directly before placing it into the PCB. they stand up nicely in the bread board which is easier to snip, and also the legs are easy to clean up because they remain in the bread board until you pull them out.
So nice watching TH-camr that don't have an add every 5 second
I have had a MASSIVE fascination with LEDs that do things on their own (flash, fade, color change, etc.) for many years now, and this tickles all of those fascinations. Especially high amounts of them in one place. I think it all started with a flashy dragon I got a while ago with the blue/red flashers. Similar to what you showed, they all start on red then slowly become un synchronized. I could watch it flash (and those boards too) flash away all day! I love it!
I like how simple this design is.. Just by relying on the manufacturing tolerance of the on/off timing.
The resistors got much higher tolerances
@@CyberlightFG in this application, resistance just controls the brightness. But it shouldn't be noticable to the naked eye
@@Spiralem Well if the timer is capacitor driven instead of crystal driven, you have two tolerances stacking up.
@@Spiralem I very sincerely doubt that the external resistor has no effect on the blink rate. It's not like there's a microcontroller and a crystal oscillator in there, it's probably some sort of simple oscillator IC and a capacitor to hold the energy for each blink. The simplest circuit I can think of would literally just be a capacitor connected across the terminals of the LED, but a cap that small would flash too quickly on its own. I doubt it's much more complicated than a few transistors, but I honestly could be wrong.
Watching them drift out of sync after start up is incredibly satisfying
As an admin of supercomputers i can confirm: They 100% look like that. They look awesome clive, i think i will build one for my office
Ooooookay, the new computer we installed exactly looks like this in the dark. Amazing.
Clive i am surprised that you didn't solder a micro usb socket to the back of the board so you save all the faf of cutting off the plug etc. Just an idea for future board designs. You did it on your LED driver board.
The rectangular PCBs are designed to go into a picture frame. It made mounting the connector awkward.
@@bigclivedotcom you need the straight on connectors like you find on gps units, surface mount on the backside of the board and the usb would come straight out the back of the frame add another footprint for a flush one and you're in business
Big Clive getting his video groove back!
Funny, I used to make these way back in the early 1990s when the blinky leds first came out. I used to make small 12v red versions in a bezel (still have one) for car dash boards before alarms were the norm, so it looked like you had a car alarm, and a thief would leave your car alone. Sold many hundreds (lost count) for $15 each. I bought thousands though, and noticed same effect, so also made large blinking panels from old populated pcbs, and sold them for hundreds of dollars as supercomputer tech art.
OMFG, did not think of using already-populated boards as a backdrop. That idea is going in my back pocket.
@13:53 or 833.83 seconds, top right corner, 1 column in, 4 down appears to be up by a few millimeters than the other LEDs. Maybe that case needs a little redesign to help maintain the same consistent pressure across the PCB and any components the foam is in contact with.
Clive's dexterity is fascinating to watch... like a sleight of hand magician, every movement is so smooth
As a chronic dyspraxic I find his hands only videos fascinating...when he holds the solder between to fingers, the object to be soldered in one hand and the soldering iron in the other is a favourite. 👉💎👈
Absolutely love your supercomputers. Inspired by you, I've constructed a supercomputer for my son using ESP8266 and a P10 red LED array of 16x32 with some code that runs a server page that he uses to write a stream of characters on the array and then returns to the intergalactic computation after some time. He is very happy everyday. I love it every time when he uses it.
The hexagon is giving me a Blake's 7 moment. Zen, put up the force wall and clear the neutron blasters for firing.
CONFIRMED!!!
@@hughn - Slave actually had a computer board (Acorn System) from a U.K. computer manufacturer mounted on it’s body…
I don't think I have ever soldered that many joints without an error or few, typically a solder bridge or open joint hidden under flux. So readers shouldn't be dismayed if they have a few errors. Thanks, Clive, for another constructive project!
Most awful is when I have lane-PCB and for convenience I want to bridge lanes (for instance for a common ground from somewhere) and the solder is like "Nope!! I won't do that no matter how hard you try!" and when you need to avoid a lane or islands getting bridged solder is like "Here you go!" :P.
The hexaputer looks awesome. Too bad a kit isn't sold to make the "cube" version.
I'm leaning towards the RGB kit rather than a solid color. It will look good with all the RGB in my new PC build.
Surely to make the cube version, you just substitute non-flashing white LEDs, where the "edges" of the cube are?
Or am I missing something?
@@BedsitBob If the person selling it supplies rgb leds then sure, if the kits are only sold in solid colors you might need to buy 3 (or leds from ebay)
@@BedsitBob No, the RGB LEDs (not currently available) can't be used for that since those RGB LEDs aren't controllable - they slowly cycle between colors. So you need three sets of different coloured random LEDs, and you probably want the "Slow" type which as Clive mentioned are not easy to get in small quantities except via these kits.
Yes, sourcing the white solid diffused LEDs for the border wouldn't be hard but that's not where the problem lies, it means you "only" need 3 kits to build one instead of 4. Assuming the Etsy selller offered the colors you want or even has three different colour variants (it has 3 currently, but not the ones used in Clive's cube) - it varies depending on supply.
OTOH if you want a solid or Fast blinking Cube it does mean you could buy just one kit and ignore the LEDs included (there's currently no "bare" kit). Not sure if the PCB layout files for it are available, but even if it is doing all the SMD resistors on the back will be a pain. Not that hard to do if you have a steady hand but will definitely take much longer to assemble.
I suspect it would be a much better idea would be talk to the Etsy seller, he/she may well me willing to put up a Cube kit if asked. Or even offering a "bare" kit with just the circuit board and smd resistors already soldered.
@@BedsitBob For me, the idea of a "kit" means everything needed is included. None of the kits currently offer having a 2nd color to use for the cube edges, so I would have to source other LEDs separate from the kit.
If I were to buy 4 kits of different colors, I could then mix-n-match the colors to make an edge color and have 3 colors for the sides. That could be repeated 2 more times, and the 4th would just be a mixture of the leftovers.
In the end, with what is currently available, buying just 1 kit won't get me the "cube".
Hehe, everyone knows RGB LED's make a computer faster :) :P.
My dad did something similar to this, but with LEDs that do a slow RGB color fade.
An acquaintance of ours who was a regular attendee of Burning Man had managed to get an old electric golf cart and wanted to give it a dreamy / etheral look, so my dad put a bunch of RGB color fade LEDs in parallel on some thin wire and powered it with an LM317 set to 3.5V.
The ceiling was covered with a few layers of a thin decorative glittery fabric with the LEDs behind most of the layers. It made a cool subtle morphing effect across the while roof liner.
I wonder if I can make that effect happen in a smaller footprint and make it look like a computer having dreams...
I also wondered what it would look like, it took a while to find a vid of some one doing it.
watch?v=ywGKHMqYLTs?t=208
These might be too close together and the ISO was not set well on the camera . Still looked OK.
The LEDs I used to have would go from slow fade to quick fade to blinking, wonder if that would produce an interesting effect .
Very common thing
So glad these are now available! Would love it if you made a video full length of you assembling a few of them and just rambling/answering questions 😁🤘
The hex one is very marvelous. Love the occasional sequences you get.
Always great tips from you when you're working on a project. :D It's quite daunting, soldering ~300 LEDs to a PCB...
Hey big Clive, I've notice that you're rapidly approaching the million subscriber mark. Which means - strap yourself in and go for throttle up! You are going to have one hell of a ride to stardom! Good luck and enjoy the overview effect you deserve it!!
Thanks. It's a while away yet. Technical channels tend to grow quite slowly.
Finally, some solder work again. Love those, and my personal supercomputers (10 by 7 1.5hz mixed monolight LED, 10 by 7 RGB morphing) is fascinating everyone who enters my office. Is is so relaxing if you need to get your head free ...
When you talk about supercomputers as as effect, I can't help but think of how they depicted them back in the old Star Trek days. It involved multi-colored lights, moving discs, and a frosted lens, so that it made random swirling patterns. Rather reminiscent of the flame-effect device you posted recently.
the wall in UFO
..... The nacelle B.O.M. must have included LED's from the 23rd century.
I have so far completed and framed two 4x6 units, one with flicker flame candle style LEDs, and one with red/blue dual color alternating LEDs. I also completed and framed an A4 unit with the same red/blue LEDs. I will be working on a second A4 unit soon with red/green alternating LEDs for Christmas! Thanks for making the files available for us!
Ohhh I would love to see the flicker one.
I would mix in about 1/3 slow LED's randomly in a fast array. I think that would make a nice effect.
I would LOVE to have a whole wall of these, or perhaps mount a big one on the side of a PC case. That'd look AWESOME!
It's a good way to get better performance. Everyone knows that more LEDs = more FPS in games.
It's so good to have affordable electronics. When I was in college in the 80's, if you blew up components (especially EEPROMS) you got a real roasting for it. Worst I did was miswire a 8086 board and fried the processor ... and pretty much all the important stuff on the board ... I just put it back in the cupboard and got another one out. Next class must have taken the hit for it.
Very nice. Twenty years ago I built a star with blinking LEDs for Christmas. And I'm in the process of building a circuit board with 392 neon glow lamps. Each glow lamp will have a capacitor and two resistors and will thus switch itself on and off. One of the two resistors limits the discharge current of the capacitor, because otherwise the electrode material of the glow lamps will be sputtered away. For 12 years I have been running a test circuit to test the life of the glow lamps, so far everything has been fine. I would just have to continue soldering the 392 circuits to finish.
This reminds me of the disco light shows I built back in the early 80's. I used to put LEDS on The front panel of the electronics housing, representing the light show, so the dj could dial in a combination of effects. This was so satisfying.
The effect of holding the incomplete board in front of the working hexputer (about 22:01) and having the slow blinking leds shine through the pin holes in it is really nice. Maybe a 2 layer 'puter with the small fast green leds with lots of extra holes drilled in it in front of another board of slow blinking larger leds?
Hey man, I just wanted to say thank you. I acquired a Yihua iron a long while back (its fantastic. soldering is no longer a struggle) and my next stop is a cheap benchtop power supply. My electronic knowledge was very rudimentary before I started binging you a few years ago. So it's thanksgiving time here in the States, and I owe you a BIG one.
This is fun.
The cube is the first thing I thought of when I saw the hexputer. Looks so much nicer than a solid hexagonal block of LEDs
I can't wait until you have enough of these panels to illuminate the entire wall behind you during live streams. Stellar.
Not great for the compression though.
At 13:49, "this is all looking pretty good"... On the right! There's a pokey-uppy one!
I love the hexagon and my first thought was it would be cool to make a cube and then I was shown the cubeputer. Awesome stuff!
Adverts to the Power of Clive... Evilution sells out, due to high demand .. Well done Clive, I will have to think of something else for my Christmas construction project..
I’ve actually used a computer with programmable blinking lights, and my software used them to show me progress of the computation. It was an Intel Hypercube with only 16 nodes, each node with several colored LEDs associated with it. So the use of self-flashers sort of rubs me the wrong way… not that I could necessarily tell except at startup. Obviously self-flashers are much more easy to use, and provide a much nicer effect than they have any right to.
Sometimes bare bone basic setup of these supercomputers are the best route to go tried tested and true
That was really soothing to watch💚🌻
Mine arrived a few weeks ago and just built it today after watching this video it took me about 4 hours 20 minutes as I don't have the circuit board holder, only had 1 led not work as I fitted backwards. I went for the fast flash pink LEDs and put a constant blue led boarder around it. I'm well happy with it.
Very cool setups on the random light leds very simple Design Clive
It looks like there is one LED in an outside row (excluding the border row) that is not seated as well as the other LEDs. You can see it in the far right row at 13:49.
I like how the resistors and LED's are all numbered on the hexputer, not necessary but satisfies my OCD :)
A fun project! A tip for cropping is to get an end cutter, much easier to use.
I was always amazed by through-hole pick-and-place machines, rapidly stuffing components into
We used to have a through hole insertion machine at work. The components came on strips of paper tape on a reel. Typically the machine would load about 199 out of 200 LEDs without issue. Insertion failures would go flying violently. It had very few problems with resistors, and handled capacitors pretty well. These days we use all SMT components.
the fact that they’re all USB powered makes me very happy
Register status lights like the ones on 70’s IBM mainframes have always attracted me
That’s marvellous, matched also by the soldering skills used.
The SMD mini-supercomputers work very well off lithium ion batteries. I have one going on my desk now.
An excellent use for "street lithium" salvaged from certain recreational devices.
Use a BMS though. Some LEDs, esp red and amber, will stay lit below minimum safe voltage.
Love the red Contrasting the blue looks good
To make soldering easier on ground planes and thicker tracks the component pad attributes can be set to 'thermal break' before ground plane flood is applied. Although this is not done for high current component pins.
Awesome Clive, I was wondering how these worked. I had assumed a small AtTiny or some other microcontroller was driving the display, but then you said each LED has an oscillator the pennty dropped - it really is that simple?!
On a different note, my mini supercomputer from mouse is *still* running months on from a little solar panel. I had a funky idea where I could add a small battery circuit and PIR sensor and drop the entire thing into epoxy "brick" and have a perfectly waterproof outdoor supercomputer!
This reminds me of watching a raster pattern on a CRT TV except a lot slower. I think it would be interesting to know how old SciFi TV shows and movies did these kind of effects.
I LOVE these, I think I'll actually make one for myself. I might get a bunch of the hexagon ones
You could join them together like a football to make an orb shape
The A4 board with non-blinking, higher-brightness (well, up to the current limit of the traces - an amp?) LEDs would make a fine "shadow-free" (well, soft-edged shadows, which is really the point) light panel for amateur videography!
Not sure about that, I have an old flashlight with a 4 x 15 array of white LEDs, the Terralux TLW-80, WorkStar 80, and the shadows from it have lots of very close overlapping edges. Looks artificial almost, like bad cgi? Each LED is causing its own edge on the shadow, basically. Diffused ones wouldn't do that, or maybe you'd have to put a diffuser over the whole thing, for a lighting panel.
You need wide angle diffused LEDs for that. High brightness LEDs are often narrow angle.
Great work!
I would also suggest adding a few more red LEDs in such a way that they form the edges of a perfect cube with blue flashing LEDs on its plane surfaces.
Man that looks so cool I can imagine folks are gunna be making their own grow lights from those zip files
Very nice, the red rim adds a little contrast. 2x👍
That cube one looks great.
Burroughs 6000 computers had an arrray of red leds (very much like the mini supercomputer here in function) that did this and did not represent data activity. I saw them on a group being burned-in at Burroughs. I also saw a failed 9000 system laying on its side in a caged storage area, 'What's that' I asked, 'We don't talk about that' was the reply.
At a milspec soldering training (>25years ago) that cropping was called hoeing and strictly forbidden as that caused the lead ends not to be covered with solder and so could cause early corrosion…!🤣
I do love the hexputer, a lot. As for the A4, I really dig it. It reminds me of Mother's interface room on the Nostromo in the movie Alien. Very, very cool. But can they be carbonated?
They come pre carbonated. If you feed them 24V they let out all the fizz in one go though...
Very Nice!!!! So Simple!!! A suggestion to the manufacturer... I noticed a distinct lack of holes near the cable connections for a strain relief. Two 1/8" or 9/64" holes right next to each other would make a great attachment for a 4" zip tie. Even one 9/64" hole would do, feed it through the single hole, around the wire, and back out, zipping to itself and the zip tie head holds it from going through the hole.
I can't help but sing in my head, "Light Bright! Light Bright! Turn on the magic of coloured lights!"
you convinced me that I just had to have one... so off to Amazon I went and ordered a combo of single, dual, and triple color fast and slow flashing leds for a total of 600 of them... plan to mount them in a sheet of lexan and spray paint the back side flat black... gonna be fun soldering the bus wires to the led legs and resistors... thinking of the design shape to be an ellipsoid...
I did mine over several evenings. I also replaced the outer ones with slow rgb which looks good especially early on when they are all one colour while the centre ones goes out of sync.
FYI, I have a hat which had a flasher LED in series with two regular LEDs and worked off a 9 volt. Worked quite well. I did a project which used six flasher LEDS with a six LED element (radio shack) and it simulated a fire quite nicely. This might be a neat thing to try in a 12 volt light up panel.
Superb video, just ordered a supercomputer got just the job for it 😎😎
I saw a neat project back in the 1980s in radio electronics (or another) where someone did one of these panels but with counter chips (flasher LEDs not there yet) and made a neat altair looking panel, thing is he use an inverter on a couple LEDs so it never be fully dark
I never knew Kane (evilution) made these, good work 🙂
Very cool looking project!
Wouldn't a blinking LED not actually require a current limiting resistor? I would think that the blinking circuit would take care of that at the same time???
(Still quite new to electronics, so any advice you guys can give would be appreciated....)
Direct across 5V the current could be quite high. Using separate resistors also reduces LEDs getting in sync, and also protects them during a reverse polarity incident.
I would mark this as a commercial just to avoid problems
It's not a paid promotion. It's just highlighting the designs based on one of my projects.
Love the project, just ordered the yellow hexputer myself.
The orange hex one! Immediately thought of Zen from Blakes 7 saying "Confirmed".
@13:55 Got to love how the moment you say that there are no LED's sticking up there is one sticking up in position #18 near your right hand middle finger...LOL :)
Putting LEDS into a CNC drilled sheet of black PVC would be great. Pick your (round) LED diameter, glue them in get wiring/soldering. 3D printing might be a decide idea too but I'd do high in-fill, only do pilot holes to still gently drill the final LED holes.
I need to design one of these that fits into a 19" telecom rack. We reduced a huge amount of our data center into a dozen hypervisor hosts (so maybe 30-40 racks of stuff down to one) - would be nice for management to think there's still tons of work going on there.
Look at the Post Apocalyptic Inventor's channel. He shows a set of rack mount props that he put together.
@@tbelding nice 👍
@@Okurka. - I'm sorry, reading that REALLY hurts. I don't want to think of how far you had to cross your eyes to manage to put that level of German, Fake German, and puns together. At least there wasn't any Pig Latin.
@@Okurka. - that's one word, yes. das cottenpicken hander? 'das pockets'? 'rubbernecken'? .. all strung together? At least you didn't end up adding something like Abwasserbeseitigung. (Or maybe in defense of Arbeiterunfallversicherungsgesetz, or someone having backpfeifengesicht )
I like this.
I love the red border.
Red to Red
Black to black
Blue to bits
With the hex it’d be interesting to see if- by installing red leds in a Y across the centre to create the outline of a cube- and then a reflection of it and oscillation between the two if it might give the illusion of a rotating cube?
Moar litez!
These are great, but my fave is the hexputer although the cube computer is a close second!
It is one of those things which look like, there is a sophisticated mind behind controlling it, but in fact it is just noise. Reminds me of the universe.
A project idea might be to have a multi-colour version of your channel logo for your live streams. It could sit above your head and have shimmering eyes and a shimmering beard? Alternatively, you could make a sign with the word 'live' underneath your logo maybe even featuring an electric blue lightning bolt. Awesome effects in this video and really simple to do.
It’ll take the “Poincaré recurrence time” for them to sync up again if you left it on 24/7, I’m still waiting for mine too do it 😀
Are you sure you didn't just miss it? :P
Just to be pedantic, at 13.48 I noticed 1 LED appeared high, first white column 2 or 3 from the top 😁, I might gat one of the Hexputers just to get back into the flow of soldering as I am so out of practice now😁
Oh these are neat! They're giving me ideas for a new bike light. I don't like the regular blinking bike lights, and while I did build some real powerful non-blinking ones, I do find them boring. If car drivers can ride around with all sorts of aftermarket headlights (which are very much illegal around here, but the cops don't seem to care), I should be allowed to ride around with a pair of supercomputers on my bike.
Oh look, what a surprise, Evilution’s store has temporarily closed due to demand! 😂
The BigClive effect strikes again…!!!
Is it known what determines the blink period? For example if the period varies by LED you could rig up a microcontroller to measure current and use that to get a precise measurement of blink period. Do that with a bunch of them and line them up by blink period and I bet you'll get a cool chaser effect. Could be nice to combine with the more random look, maybe on the borders...
What's interesting is that there is some intense computation going on. By the universe, that is...
This just needs a prismatic lens over the top of it to make it period-appropriate. I had a toy as a kid which had flashing lights behind such a lens which made each one look like a starburst.
I don't miss soldering LEDs... Worked in a place years ago soldering, could do 4 thousand LEDs a hour... (Components placed already)
I was unaware that blinking LEDs were available, got some ideas now..
Thanks for the video!
You should try an experiment where you have the hexaputer on a live stream, versus a static LED array of the same size. And see how it affects the file.