Here's another way to add beautiful lighting effects to your jewelry. Tiny, inexpensive graphic screens are easy to embed in your projects. They aren't as bright and showy as LEDs like Neopixels, but they give you the ability to craft very customized light and color effects. You can animate them and even display images. And of course you can control them with an Arduino.
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| A really simple pattern adds a lot of visual interest to this millefiori piece. The pattern changes slowly over time to give the pendant a constantly transforming appearance. The light really helps draw the eye in dim lighting. If you don't want that, simply turn off the screen. You can create any pattern, animation or even image that you want and change them as slowy or quickly as you desire. |
I'm going to use fused glass as an example again. I like to work with fused glass because it poses so many challenges and can have so many different forms. Each piece is unique and calls for a careful pairing of light.
And because fused glass is pretty all by itself, it's also challenging not to overpower the innate beauty of the material.
Last week I posted about using a simple LCD light valve to add interest. That works well with semi-transparent glass.You can also use these tiny graphics screens to add patterns and lights to the same piece of glass.
However, I have struggled to find something that woks well with clear glass pieces. Nothing ever worked well in pieces that had areas of transparent glass. So I hauled out my LCD screen collection and tried some of them. I think this technique has some definite possibilities.
Both
Adafruit and
Sparkfun have a wide range of sizes and form factors for these types of screens. For jewelry, the "deck of cards" size is probably the biggest you would need for your largest statement pendant. I prefer the matchbook sized ones. I have played with the tiny thumbnail sized versions, but after getting diffused there isn't that much difference between them and a much cheaper LED.
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| Here are just a few of the screen sizes available. (That's a US quarter for scale) |
There are a few things to remember when choosing a screen:
If you want to display actual images then you need to make sure the screen comes with an SD card slot so you can store the image or images.
Don't forget about the monochrome black-and-white versions if all you need is a gentle flicker. There are also versions where the entire screen can be any single color and you can draw in black.
The faster your microprocessor is the faster you can change the screen display. This might not be important to you. I can code and design animations well enough to get small chips to do what I need. But if you want to do fancy animations consider using a more powerful chip like the M0. With the Pi Zero, you could even play videos using the same screens.
You can use traditional tools like Photoshop or Illustrator to create your patterns and images. For people who don't code, this makes this technique much more accessible. You an also use code to draw over and manipulate images, so it offers the best of both worlds.
I will keep using the LEDs and NeoPixels for jewel based. big bling style projects. And the 3d printed jewelry actually needs all the brightness NeoPixels provide just to show through the plastic during daytime.
But the more I play with LCD graphic screens and glass the more possibilities I see. I've got several ideas, and the really neat thing about his technique is that you can leave the screen off to emphasize the beauty of the glass itself - or you can show any solid color, pattern, animation or image on the exact same piece.
In fact, the same piece of glass can be given a completely new "look" by changing what's on the display.
I'll post more images of my experiments soon, and I think I might need to start doing video just to better demonstrate the effects possible with this combo.
