Thread: Timed LEDs?
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Old 12-11-2005, 11:36 PM   #3 (permalink)
Martian
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Canada
The music part is easy. Grab yourself a set of stereo headphones. Now, here you can go two options. You cut off the earpieces, then you can either twist the signal wires together or keep them seperate and connect them to seperate clusters or LED's to have one set react to each channel (left/right). I'm not an electrical engineer, so I'm not sure if you'll need to amplify the signal or not as I have no idea how much current an LED will take. In any case, if you use that as the input on your LED's the signal will be amplitude modulated according to the signal(s) coming out of the line jack on your sound card (where the stereo jack plug you took off the headphones is connected) which, if I remember my electrical theory correctly, ought to give you the desired effect. If you want to get really fancy, you can build the LED's and amp (if necessary) into an enclosure and have yourself a little musical lightbox. It's portable and it will plug into any 1/4" headphone jack, which will make it suitable for use with a lot more than just a PC. Also, it'll be fucking cool.
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