The Butt Lamp: Light From Where The Sun Don’t Shine

[Trent] is one of those guys who can make things happen. A friend of his gifted him a  mannequin derriere simply because he knew [Trent] would do something fun with it. “Something fun” turned out to be sound reactive LED butt. At first blush, this sounds like just another light organ. This butt has a few tricks up its …. sleeve which warrant a closer look. The light comes from some off the shelf 5050 style RGB LED strip. The controller is [Trent’s] own design. He started with the ever popular MSGEQ7 7 Band Graphic Equalizer Display Filter, a chip we’ve seen before. The MSGEQ7 performs all the band filtering and outputs 7 analog levels corresponding to the amplitude of the input signal in that band. The outputs are fed into an ATTiny84, which drives the RGB strip through transistors.

The ATTiny84 isn’t just running a PWM loop. At startup, it takes 10 samples from each frequency band. The 10 samples are then averaged, and used to create a noise filter. The noise filter helps to remove any ambient sound or distortions created by the microphone. Each band is then averaged and peak detected. The difference between the peak and the noise is the dynamic range for that band. The ATTiny84 remaps each analog sample to be an 8 bit value fitting within that dynamic range. The last step is to translate  the remapped signal values through a gamma lookup table. The gamma table was created to make the bright and dark colors stand out even more. [Trent] says the net result is that snare and kick drum sounds really pop compared to the rest of the music.

Without making this lamp the butt of too many jokes, we’d like to say we love what [Trent] has done. It’s definitely the last word in sound reactive lamps. Click through to see [Trent’s] PCB, and the Butt Lamp in action.

led-controller

28 thoughts on “The Butt Lamp: Light From Where The Sun Don’t Shine

  1. Fasster than light technology.
    Good thing this thing doesn’t require an old screw-in lightbulb.
    Never combine this with a lavalamp.
    Soon to be available on arsetechnica.com.
    There is light on the dark side of the moon.
    Does this project meet energy star requirements?
    So this what photographers call backlight.
    This build, is it using LED’s? Light Emitting Derrière.

    Well, got it out of the system….

    1. I wish you had at least told what one could expect to find when following the link (especially since it is far from obvious from the link itself) and how it relates to/differs from this.

      (I admit I was rash to mentally consider this spam, but gave it a chance. So in case anyone else have grown bitter like me and were avoiding the link out of habbit; it does seem relvevant)

    2. how do you thing I feal, I just gave out my real name to the whole internet, and my Facebook account is public because I really do like to share stuff like this. I must be a gluten for punishment.

      And sorry about not sharing what the picture was, I wanted it to be a surprise, and I have to go low tech because I’m still learning how to use the arduino.

    1. if human eyes had tighter tolerances in manufacturing defect AND wear&tear
      (birth, use, ect)
      then we could make devices to cause temporary blindness
      without permenant damage,
      unfortuately that would require object recognition,
      accurate distance measurement,
      accurate measurement of current laser emmision power,
      AND a full detailed-upclose pre-examination of
      ALL eyes, and for all data to be numerically factored
      into determining laser power, focal point, and heating effects on retina.

      it needs to be recalculated at a rate GREATER then
      the rate of damage to the retina,
      at the laser power being emmitted. IN REAL TIME.

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