Ikea Dioder Hack

[Joseph] wrote in to tell us about his Ikea Dioder hack. The Dioder is a lighting system with a silly name from Ikea. It is basically 4 RGB LED bars that are connected to a controller that will cycle their colors in different manners. They aren’t individually addressable, and at $50 aren’t really that great of a deal for people who could build their own. [Joseph] thought that maybe, if the features could be extended, it could be a decent lighting system. He bought it and began searching. Disappointed by the lack of hacks available, he cracked it open and began brainstorming. Ultimately, he decided to interface it with his computer. He can now control it with software, so making an ambilight clone shouldn’t be too difficult.

He does mention that he thought of making 4 independent drivers so that each light bar could be a different color. We agree that this would be the next logical step, possibly even rewiring for individual access to each LED.

12 thoughts on “Ikea Dioder Hack

  1. Hah hah yes! I found myself at the till at my local Ikea with a bunch of stuff including a Dioder, finding out how much they cost (40 UK pounds sterling) when it appeared on my receipt I nearly had a heart attack – they hadn’t labelled the shelves near the product well enough, I thought they were £15, and lets face it, £15 is about what we’d expect given what it is actually made of.
    I went over to the customer services desk for my money back, they were happy to oblige.

  2. For a demo set up for work I hacked one of these.
    Soldered a connector to the PIC processor so I could re program it using a Pickit 2.
    Removed the beeper and switch and used the freed up pins as input so I could connect them to an embedded linux board.
    Lost the original Dioder program since the PIC was code protected.

  3. @Lin4u: I was going to speculate that “dioder” has that meaning in some Scandinavian language groups, as that makes perfect sense. Some stuff is pluralised with “en” in German, so yeah…

  4. Quick question: is the 4 RGB the same wire that could be used with the 4 pack round dioder led multi-use light? I went to splice it with some cheap radioshack intercom wire, whose wire pops off along with the hard plastic coating when you go to strip it. Anyways….if someone can please give me an idea of what wire to splice this with (its a 24 awg) I would greatly appreciate it!

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