Not only does this mood lamp which [J. Sutton] built look great, but we love the modular design he adopted when building the circuit boards.
If you’re building something that is going to sit on your desk for some time it just has to look good. We think that he achieved that, using a small block of oak as the base, and a cloudy white cube of unknown origin as a diffuser. Notice that the different colors are not mixed. There’s a baffle inside the diffuser that keeps them separate as early testing showed any combination of intensities was resulting in nearly the same shade of color.
The part we really like is the modular design of his circuit boards. The project is based around a Teensy++ 2.0 board. He first built a PCB baseboard which feature two SIL sockets to accept the legs of the Teensy. There is a third SIL socket which accepts some long legs from the LED host board, letting it perch on top of the Teensy.
“and a cloudy white cube of unknown origin as a diffuser.”
In his replies, he [J. Sutton] said he got it from Ebay:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/LED-Cube-Mood-Light-Colour-Changing-Night-Lamp-Gift-UK-/390541999558?pt=UK_Home_Garden_Lamps&hash=item5aee1dfdc6
So he bought a mood lamp. Redesigned and replaced the internals to make… a mood lamp?
Well ok, fair enough added features and programmability :)
What I do have to say is …. this is cool… simple small…. and totally able to use batteries as well instead of a plug in for portability.
What I am curious about is the frosted cube what is that made out of? Or how did he even make that because his website unless I missed it doesn’t say exactly what that is.
:O MG!, Freaky!!. That was my first thought when I saw this as I have also been thinking of building a mood lamp (so that’s what they are called!) and this is almost exactly how I have been picturing it in my head. Feels as though he has been in my mind (hmmm….Mental Intruder Alert hack, anyone?). This makes the hack way more cool for me. But then I never though of email and facebook as the input sources (This just got even cooler). Nice idea, neat build, awesome stuff.
“Mental Intruder Alert hack”
Time to change the tin foil under your cap, the existing foil is starting to leak!
B^)
Time to abandon tin and go for lead instead :)
looks like the diffuser was a previous moodlamp … i got a bunch of similar to keep the diffusers from from b and q .. 99 pence each, not bad.. ended up using them as night time target practice :), couldnt resist
http://www.amazon.co.uk/LED-Colour-changing-Cube-Light/dp/B005M1XASG
or i could have just read his post where he tells us where the diffuser came from
anyway.. nice tidy project .. good chap
I’m not sure why you would go to the effort of building two pcbs when you could fit the whole lot onto one. :/
Funny, i count 3 boards that could have been replaced by 1.
You’re not wrong there! I originally designed it to use up the teensy ++ which was laying around, although now that I know it works and looks pretty nice I’m thinking of revising the design to fit it onto one board. I might even venture into the world of SMD if I can pick up the courage!
SMD isn’t hard, especially not if you go for an AVR in TQFP and order proper PCBs.
I have found that most of the fear of SMD comes from people telling others that SMD is hard, or from not knowing that the principles are slightly different with SMD.
Watch a couple of tutorials on youtube, get a bottle of good flux, and you’re there.
@Sven
The teensy is pre-made.. but yes, it would be easy to put everything including the AVR on one board.
>I have found that most of the fear of SMD comes from people telling others that SMD is hard
The Hackaday editors write this every time they write anything about SMD. *sigh*
@James
If you can solder through-hole you can solder the 0.8mm AVR and a bunch of 0805 passives easily. Even if you mess up to the point that you have bridged a complete side of the chip you can rescue it with solder wick.
I have successfully taught people with near zero soldering experience how to solder 0603, only took me 10 minutes. Of course i have met people who couldn’t solder a 5mm LED after 2 hours of trying too. A lot of it is setting your mind to accepting that it’s possible.
Through some testing i have found that 0805 is a good starting point, 0603 is a little too small for some people but 1206 is just ridiculously big.
Still have not found anyone determined to learn who couldn’t solder a 32pin TSOP AVR, USB connector and a bunch of 0805 components with minimal instructions, given that they knew which end of the soldering iron was the hot one, and had tried some through-hole before.
Thanks guys, I’m thinking I might buy a SMT practice kit or something just to get the hang of it. Thanks for the advice!
“Cube of unknown origin”… the original site notes that it was originally a “dumb” (non-programmable) LED mood light from eBay (search LED Cube Mood Light Colour Changing Night Lamp Gift UK).
Ebay = Unknown+ HaD(0)
.’. Ebay = Unknown
It’s OK., but not awe-inspiring.
And a bit over-engineered and costly perhaps for a notifier? I mean an entire teensy and designed PCB for this might be over the top, but if you got spare funds and like to live in style I guess it’s a thing to do though. Although – when money is no object then why not go wireless too? Or at least use a few of the many ports of the teensy to add a feedback key or keys so that if you press the cube it sends a command for instance, maybe put the computer in standby when pressed for instane, then you have dual functionality
Lastly I can’t but help notice the poor sod has a facebook account. Oh well.
When you move out of your mom’s basement and get a job, you too can actually do stuff like this!
You are universes away from the truth there, and in fact if YOU ‘moved out of your mom’s basement’ you would know that you have to manage your money in the adult world. And yeah it’s annoying, but it’s the reality for the 99%,
Unless you count the fools who get into massive CC debt in which case in the US it’s only 10-15% :)
I guess there’s the issue here actually, from a viewpoint of the CC junkies I’m the oddball, but I’m OK with it, each of us makes their own determination how to do things.
Anyway I’m not mad.
Incidentally, james himself in the comment above says he used the teensy since he had it lying around but he might move to something else, and if a cheap attiny works why dedicate a whole teensy to it? And if you do you got a teensy for the next project, and a teensy has tons of I/O that might be used rather than ‘go to waste’ if you pardon the expression.
laying*
Correcting myself to not propagate the error.
If you’re going to buy a bunch of microcontrollers to leave lying around, wouldn’t you spend the extra and buy more versatile, powerful ones? So then when you have your next idea you’re not limited by your hardware.
I suppose one could keep a range of different MCUs with varying power, but you’d need to buy quite a few to cover all the possible projects you might make. So for most people I think it’s sensible and cheaper to have a few reasonably powerful chips, and sometimes underuse them. It’s only a few $ difference for so much more freedom and utility.
I would (and did) buy a couple of the more powerful ones, and a whole bunch of the cheaper ones. This is because mostly you just want some simple functions and don’t need a lot of processing power or flash.
Why do one when you can do both?
There are plenty of controllers that are both cheaper and more powerful than the ATmega devices.
@arlet: indeed but it’s easier to build upon existing stuff and to have some support in the way of clear documentation and examples, and a lot of stuff out there lacks such things, even though they are cheaper and more powerful.
But hey a teensy3 is already a more powerful (ARM based running at 48MHz) arduino in a way, and you can use the arduino IDE with it, so if you wait more powerful stuff comes along in the end that still has support.
What a nice little superpowered mood lamp! It looks like a fun way to think about smart PCB layout and stretch the brain muscles a little bit. It looks like it’d be great on a desk or on a bedside table.