Hacking The IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD LED Wall Lamp

The IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD is a pixel-style LED wall lamp that comes with a few baked-in animations, and [ph1p] improved it immensely with an ESP32 board and new firmware. The new controller provides all kinds of great new abilities, including new modes and animations, WiFi control, and the ability to send your own images or drawings to the panel. All it takes is desoldering the original controller and swapping in a programmed ESP32.

Hacking in a new controller provides a whole new range of capabilities.

Sadly, opening the unit up is a bit of a pain. It seems the back panel is attached with rivets rather than screws, but it will yield to a little bit of prying force.

The good news is that once the back panel is off, the inside of the OBEGRÄNSAD is very hackable. All the parts and connectors are easily accessible from where they are, and a nicely-labeled pin header makes a convenient attachment point for the new ESP32 board. There’s no need to disassemble any further once the back is off, and that’s always nice.

Going a bit smaller, we’ve also seen an IKEA LED nightlight greatly improved by a little hacking, and there are plenty more IKEA hacks where that came from.

18 thoughts on “Hacking The IKEA OBEGRÄNSAD LED Wall Lamp

    1. FTR: As far as I can see, the build-in “raindrop” animation uses the fastest refresh rate and it shifts bits in at a peak rate of ca 220k bit/s. It seems to do this in groups of one byte, with an extra delay between bytes and between “frames”, for an effective total frame rate of ca 530 Hz. This animation uses gray-scale pixels, therefore the overkill frame rate (dimmer pixels are repeated less often). Doesn’t mean that is the max the hardware can handle, of course, but it’s already plenty IMHO. The overall brightness seems to be controlled via PWM on the “EN” line. Everything is in 5V logic.

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