LED Floor Lamp Really Ties The Room Together

led_floor_lamp

Instructables user [lincomatic] was doing some home decorating and was trying to find something that would really tie the room together. He decided against adding a nice rug, a light fixture is what he was after. Rather than settle on a simple lamp for the corner of the room, he constructed an 8×8 RGB LED fixture he calls the Lampduino.

He constructed the 8×8 grid using some leftover cardboard packaging, then got to work wiring up the LED strands. In a rather unorthodox move, he decided to wire wrap the LED leads instead of soldering them. Once the LEDs were in place, he wired everything up to his Colorduino, an Arduino derivative specially made for driving large quantities of LEDs. A thin sheet of drafting film was placed on both sides of the board, then it was mounted on a stand for display.

His Daft Punk-esque lamp can be programmed to display just about anything from color patterns to video game sprites, and it can also be timed to music if desired. We think it looks great, and could make for a nice wall hanging if he ever got sick of the stand. While the wire wrap technique sounds like it sped up the development of this project significantly, we would be interested in hearing how it holds up after a few months of use.

Check out the trio of videos embedded below to see the Lampduino in action.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZUnk9GjPEw&w=470]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpqwqo4Rcd8&w=470]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFOD6wtOcUo&w=470]

12 thoughts on “LED Floor Lamp Really Ties The Room Together

  1. I bet the wire-wrap holds up just fine. I gutted a ~20-year-old component amp the other day, and found wire-wrapped connections between the power supply and the main board — somewhat surprising, but they were all in great shape and not even a little bit loose. So long as nobody’s fooling around with it, I see no reason why it should be a problem.

    (Also, I know 6p6c and 8p8c, but what good’s a 3p1c connector?)

  2. @Aaron – I’m not certain what good a 3p1c is, but 6p2c connectors are quite common and cheep. Maybe they decided to cut one of these in half for some goofy reason.

  3. Cool, but I’m not a fan of how he’s diffusing the diode. IMO it would look better if the pixels were one solid color. I know that is hard to do. I’m not saying I could do it better, or have a better way of doing it. As it is however, I’m not a fan.

  4. Wirewrap ,if done right, is superior to soldering in many respects (except for labor.)
    It actually forms a cold weld at *EACH* corner of the post, every time the wire passes. It is not near as likely to break the wire off at the joint. (The first few wraps of insulated wire provide a strain relief) A soldered connection may have a thin layer of solder between the conductive surfaces, while a wire wrapped connection is a direct conductor-to-conductor join, providing for minimal added resistance as well as a joint that handles high temperatures like a champ.

    Can your soldering job handle heavy vibrations at 350 deg. C?
    Wirewrap can!

    But in all honesty, I prefer soldering in most cases myself.
    Wirewrap sucks for most hobbyists for a big reason: How do you strip the insulation off a 30ga wire anyhow? I don’t own a stripper capable of doing that without damaging the core of the wire too.

  5. Also Agreed that wirewrap is superior in many applications. I agree fully with daniel above. It sure is time consuming though.

    But most of the wire wrap tools have a stripper for the 30AWG wire. At least all of the ones I do, and it works great for kynar(SP?) and teflon insulation. My main issue is getting the length of the wire right, to have it lay flat on the board. Also sourcing the pins for wirewrap can be a pain, and the good ones are often expensive….and sharp as hell lol.

    But it’s nice that you don’t need any power to do up a circuit, and with CA glue, the parts are usually secured just as well, if not better than if they were soldered.

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