LED Hourglass

My final project for my Physical Computing class at Parsons The New School for Design, this interactive hourglass can be flipped upside down to watch the light slowly and smoothly drain from one side to the other using over 50 LEDs.

It senses its current orientation using a home made accelerometer and uses a TLC 4950 shift register to allow for eight separate rows of LEDs that are all able to fade into one another.