Hi Windell,

I love the LED panel and enjoyed assembling it as well. I vaguely understand how it works. I was wondering if there is a way to modify the board to make the lights in a certain quadrant stay on while an object is stationary in that area? And perhaps then fade/ripple out after it is removed?

I am really excited about your products; they have inspired me in many new directions.

Dirk

Hi Dirk,
I'm not sure of an easy way to make that modification. Not saying that it isn't possible, just that I haven't looked into it.

We designed the panels to be only sensitive to *change* not to the total "amount of stuff" above the LED panels so that this way the panels can be installed under all kinds of different surfaces. If we made one that lit up whenever you put something above it, it would see the glass, and stay lit up all the time. Our design sees the glass too, but ignores it after a while, so that it *can* see when you put something on the table as well. If you wanted to make one that detected something on top of the glass only and stayed on while it was there, the first thing that you'd have to do is to add an adjustment location so that you could tune out the effect of the glass. That would mean adding a little trimpot at the location of every sensor and some arduous tuning as you adjust every single trimpot and put the glass back on to test each one.

So.... it's a practical issue, not an electronics issue that has kept us from looking into that.

Duly and thankfully noted!

Is there a practical way to lengthen or otherwise modify the pulsing effect?

waiting in anticipation....

Is there a practical way to lengthen or otherwise modify the pulsing effect?

Hmmm. "Practical?" The circuit is pretty finely tuned as you have it. The best way to make changes is to start with a circuit simulator. But I should warn you, it gets challenging when you start to simulate a lot of nodes together.

We've gone through a few different versions with slightly different response frequency, but we've also tuned the photosensitivity and some other parameters at the same time. If you are sticking to a single panel-- not tiling it and not planning to-- then you can start to play a bit. Start by trying to increase the value of R106 (and corresponding parts in the other quadrants). I *think* you will also need to change R105 (etc) to compensate for the resulting change in gain. Don't make changes to R101 - R103 or R107 - R110.