#1 Supercool analysts at GreyB (#IAMAGREYB)

Ever since the first person thought of using a stick to create fire, humans have been hard at work creating new tools and gadgets. But for Tarun creating new and supercool things is beyond just ‘work’.

Who’s Tarun?

Tarun is a research analyst in the Patent monetization team at GreyB AND he loves experimenting with new things in it. To narrow it down, he loves to take random ideas from his imagination and bring them to life.

I would be frank here, don’t you love when you are surrounded by such talented people?

Imagine this – when you have a team lead in the prior art team who is an amazing painter, the manager of your data science team who is a master in calligraphy, a new talent that just joined the sales team is an amazing guitarist, an editor who is an amazing cartoonist, a team leader in the landscape team whose photography skills are unmatched, a poet, a singer, a dancer, a chef, a mountaineer, a yoga expert, you just feel privileged when you get to hear about their creations every other day.

We thought we need to bring the stories of these crazy people to all the readers of our blog. This post is dedicated to Tarun.

Here is an email I received from him last week that made me dedicate this whole post to him-

SUB: DIY and other crazy tech

Morning everyone,

Recently, I started catching up with an old habit of mine – creating pointless but cool tech. So I thought why not just start a new thread to share it with you’ll. Feel free to post in some of your techs too.

For now,

Can you all guess what this is?

Well, it’s called an LED strip. We have all seen these in one form or other (for example, as ambiance lighting in a bar). But did you notice something odd about this particular strip, I mean doesn’t an LED need only two terminals to light up?
Like this –

Taller one for positive and the other shorter terminal for the ground

One could just connect a bunch of these in parallel and get a whole strip. But my particular LED strip has 5 terminals instead.
Here’s why it’s got so many terminals –
If you look closely,

You’ll notice that every single LED has a very tiny (~5 mm dia) microprocessor!!

And every LED has – power (+5v) Ground (-ve) and Di (data input). There’s also an arrow to indicate the arrow of the data flow. The strip is designed such that you can plug it into something like this –

And, here comes the interesting part, program it with your laptop!

What’s truly crazy is you can even cut along the strip anywhere to shorten it, and it’ll still work, you’ll get 2 or n number of new strips. kind of like an earthworm! (We do learn from nature all the time, don’t we?)

The possibilities with this are endless. You can address each individual LED to light up in any coded sequence, at a particular color (R or G or B) or any permutation of these and even a defined brightness.

Now to the fun part.

I printed a moon (a hemisphere) on my 3D printer and put the strips on the inner surface of the sphere.

The Arduino code can drive these LEDs to project the exact phase of the moon in real-time.
Here’s how it looks at night –

It may be totally pointless but still pretty cool.
Here’s another embodiment of the LED–

It’s a Rubik’s cube that’s supposed to solve itself, here’s how it looks in action –

P.S – I don’t do any coding, I just love to design stuff on CAD (Solidworks) and print it all!

Next up – DIY audio.

Stay tuned!
Regards,
Tarun