Transforming Lamp Built With LED Filaments

May 21, 2026 by 8 Comments

[Nick Electronics] had an idea to build a stylish lamp that could transform its shape while lit. This goal was achieved beautifully with the aid of many, many filament LEDs.

If you’re unfamiliar with filament LEDs, they’re basically thin plastic filaments stuffed with lots of individual LEDs that are very close together. This effectively creates a continuous, flexible, glowing string that can be used for all sorts of creative purposes.

[Nick] packed the lights into an interlocking stack of PCBs that make up the lamp’s structure. Each PCB layer hosts four filaments mounted around the outer edge, and has a pin that locks into a groove in the next layer to allow them to tug each other around as they turn. The PCBs rotate around a central shaft, with power passed from one to the other via interlinking wires. Drive is via a stepper motor on top of the lamp, controlled by an A4988 driver. There’s also an ATmega48 microcontroller onboard, which is the brains of the operation. A DC-DC converter onboard steps up the 5 V input voltage from USB-C to 10 volts for the stepper motor.

It’s neat to watch the lamp in action, glowing and slowly shifting in patterns as the layers catch and rotate in and out of alignment. We’ve seen interesting builds in this vein before, like this fantastic origami lamp from a few years ago.

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Mod This IKEA Lamp Into Smart Lighting For Not A Lot

May 15, 2026 by 18 Comments

The IKEA SKAFTSÄRV is an economical LED accent lamp, but while highly affordable it has only fixed lighting options. [simoneluconi] shows how it can easily be turned into a fully-configurable, WLED-connected, WiFi-enabled RGB lamp with little more than an ESP32-based board.

A thirty-LED lamp with integrated diffusor and stand can be had for surprisingly cheap. Add an equally-economical ESP32 board and it becomes a whole lot more.

To do this, the control board of the lamp gets replaced with an ESP32-C3 Super Mini board. Control and automation comes from WLED, open-source software that offers flexible automation and control for LED lights with a wide range of features, including native Android and iOS apps.

Modifying the SKAFTSÄRV lamp is fairly straightforward, but opening the unit does require breaking some glued seams to get inside. Once that’s done, the replacement board fits nicely into the housing and the unit can be closed back up. As far as WLED is concerned, the new lamp has 30 LEDs, WS281x type, GRB color order.

The end result is a stylish accent lamp with built-in diffusor and mount that can be controlled over WiFi with all the features WLED brings, such as easy integration with Home Assistant.

This isn’t the first time IKEA’s LED lighting has been given a powerup. Their pixel-style LED wall-mounted OBEGRÄNSAD, which displays a few canned animations out of the box, got considerably enhanced with a new controller.

Thanks [Crash] for the tip!

Retrotechtacular: Julius Sumner Miller Breaks Lamps With Magnets

May 6, 2026 by 23 Comments

If you watched the Mickey Mouse Club way back when, you might remember Professor Wonderful, who was, in reality, physics professor [Julius Sumner Miller]. He also had his own show, “Why Is It So?” along with appearances on talk shows. We recently ran across one of the shows from 1962 where [Miller] uses electromagnets to break a lamp.

[Miller] moved to Australia, and this episode is from the Australian version of “Why Is It So?” As you might expect, given the topic, the professor covers Oersted and Faraday.

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Solar Supercapacitor Lamp Probably Won’t Get You Saved At Sea

January 29, 2026 by 19 Comments

Most solar lights are cheap garbage that exist just to put more microplastics into the environment as they degrade in short order. [Jeremy Cook] built his own solar light, however, and this one might just last a little longer.

Most solar lights rely on the cheapest nickel-cadmium or nickel-metal hydride cells that are available on the market. They don’t tend to have a lot of capacity and they wear out incredibly fast. [Jeremy] went a different route for his build, though, instead relying on a rather tasty supercapacitor to store energy. Unlike a rechargeable battery, that may only last a few thousand cycles, these supercaps are expected to perform over 500,000 charge/discharge cycles without failure. With such longevity, [Jeremy] suggests his build could last a full 1369.8 years, assuming it charged and discharged once a day. Whether the plastic transistor, LEDs, or diode could hold up over such a long period is another question entirely.

Electronically, the build is relatively simple. The solar panel collects light energy and turns it into electricity, charging the supercaps through a diode. The supercaps are only able to discharge through a transistor, which only turns on when the voltage output by the solar panel drops at night time, and the voltage on the base becomes lower than that on the emitter. When current flows through the transistor, it then lights the LED in turn and the device glows in the darkness. As a nice touch, the whole circuit is installed in a glass jug of syrup originally sourced from Costco. Files are on Github for those eager to explore further.

Given the light-in-a-bottle construction, [Jeremy] also playfully imagined that a lamp like this could theoretically be used as a safety device. If lost at sea, you could charge it using the sun and try and use it to signal for help. However, upon casually exploring the concept, he notes that a small solar-powered light will only raise the chance of a far-off ocean rescue from “extremely unlikely” to “still very unlikely.”

You can do all kinds of neat things with free energy from the sun, from mowing your lawn to processing waste products. Video after the break.

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Fiber Optic Lamp Modified To Be Scarily Bright

January 21, 2026 by 20 Comments

[Brainiac75] is a fan of fiber optic lamps, except for one thing—they’re often remarkably dim. Thus, they set out to hack the technology to deliver terrifying amounts of light while still retaining their quirky charm.

Older fiber optic lamps use a dim filament lamp or halogen lamp to light them up. They also often feature a spinning color disk to vary the light patterns, which does have the side effect of absorbing some of the already-limited light output.

When it came to upgrading his own decades-old lamp, [Braniac75] decided to initially stick within the specs of the original halogen lamp. The fixture was rated for 12 volts at 5 watts, with a GU4/GZ4 compatible base, and white light was desired so the color wheel could still do its thing.  Swapping out the original 5 W halogen for a 2.5 W LED unit brought a big upgrade in brightness, since the latter is roughly equivalent to a 20 W halogen in light output. Upgrading to a 4.2 W LED pushed things even further, greatly improving the look of the lamp.

The video also explores modding a modern fiber optic lamp, too. It was incredibly cheap, running off batteries and using a single color-changing LED to illuminate the fibers. [Braniac75] decided to try illuminating the plastic fibers with an RGB stage lighting laser rig—namely, the LaserCube Ultra 7.5 W from Wicked Lasers. With this kind of juice, the fiber lamp is eye-searingly bright, quite literally, and difficult to film. However, with the laser output dialed way down, the lamp looks amazing—with rich saturated colors dancing across the fiber bundle as the lasers do their thing.

If you’ve ever wanted to build a fiber lamp that doesn’t look like a cheap gimmick, now you know how. We’ve looked at weird applications for these lamps before, too.

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A hand holding the Zoyi ZT-QB9 Smart Clamp meter

Review And Demo Of The Zoyi ZT-QB9 Smart Clamp Meter

January 18, 2026 by 14 Comments

Over on YouTube [Kiss Analog] reviews the New Zoyi ZT-QB9 Smart Clamp meter.

If you’re putting together an electronics lab from scratch you absolutely must get a multimeter to start. A typical multimeter will be able to do current measurements but it will require you to break the circuit you’re measuring and interface it to your meter using its mechanical probes.

A good choice for your second, or third, multimeter is a clamp-based one. Many of the clamp meters have the clamp probe available for current measurements while still allowing you to use the standard 4mm banana jack probes for other measurements, particularly voltage and resistance.

If you’re curious to know more about how clamp meters work the answer is that they rely on some physics called the Hall Effect, as explained by the good people at Fluke.

In the video the following clamp meters are seen: Zoyi ZT-QB9, PROVA 11, and Hioki CM4375. If you’re in the market for a clamp meter you might also like to consider the EEVblog BM036 or a clamp meter from Fluke.

We have of course posted about clamp meters before. Check out Frnisi DMC-100: A Clamp Meter Worth Cracking Open or ESP32 Powers DIY Smart Energy Meter if you’d like to know more. Have your own trusty clamp meter? Don’t need no stinkin’ clamp meter? Let us know in the comments!

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Windmill Desk Lamp Is Beautifully Soothing

December 19, 2025 by 25 Comments

Typically, lamps provide a stationary source of light to illuminate a given area and help us see what we’re doing. However, they can also be a little more artistic and eye-catching, like this windmill lamp from [Huy Vector].

It’s somewhat of a charming desk toy, constructed out of copper wire soldered into the form of a traditional windmill. At its base, lives a simple motor speed controller, while up top, a brushed DC gearmotor is responsible for turning the blades. As you might imagine, it’s a little tricky to get power to flow to the LED filaments installed on those blades while they happen to be rotating. That’s where the build gets tricky, using the output shaft of the motor’s gear drive and a custom slip ring to pass power to the LEDs. That power comes courtesy of a pair of 16340 lithium-ion cells, which can be juiced up with the aid of a USB-C charger board.

It’s an elegant build, and rather charming to watch in motion to boot. We love a good lamp build here at Hackaday, particularly when they’re aesthetically beautiful.

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