Off-Axis Rotation For Amiga-Themed Levitating Lamp

December 8, 2025 by 5 Comments

Do you remember those levitating lamps that were all the rage some years ago? Floating light bulbs, globes, you name it. After the initial craze of expensive desk toys, a wave of cheap kits became available from the usual suspects. [RobSmithDev] wanted to make a commemorative lamp for the Amiga’s 40th anniversary, but… it was missing something. Sure, the levitating red-and-white “boing” ball looked good, but in the famous demo, the ball is spinning at a jaunty angle. You can’t do that with mag-lev… not without a hack, anyway.

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Print in place board holder

Print-and-Clamp: Rubber Band PCB Stand Slides Into Duty

November 3, 2025 by 14 Comments

When it comes to soldering on a PCB it almost always helps to have some way to hold the board off your workbench, allowing leads to pass though with out making it unstable and keeping it level while working with tiny components. This project sent in by [Mel] was born out of necessity he was going to be teaching a soldering class and needed a way to keep boards in place, and so designed this Print-in-place PCB holder.

While there are certainly a long list of products designed to serve this function [Mel] took advantage of some idle 3D printers to turn out PCB stands that require no assembly, just the addition of a rubber band and they are ready for use. Part of the challenge of print in place 3D prints is dialing in the tolerances of your design and printer, and for this [Mel] printed some smaller slider mechanisms that were quick to print and iterate with until he was happy and could start turning out the larger design using those values.

The full PCB holder includes 3 independent sliders allowing for boards of all shapes and sizes to be held. To tension the board mounts there is a slow lower down on the uprights to allow for a rubber band to be added pulling all three towards the center. Finally [Mel] included small trays between the 3 sliders to give you a convenient place to components are you assemble your board. The 3D print falls are all available for download and [Mel] also included the small slider as a 3D print for you to check your printer tollerances before you run off the final design. Thanks [Mel] for sending in your soldering tool design, it’s a great addition to some of our other soldering assistant devices we’ve featured.

Folding Lamp Becomes A Tasty Reverb Tank

November 3, 2025 by 6 Comments

If you’re a musician and you want a reverb effect, there are lots of ways to go about it. You can use software plugins, all kinds of rack-mount effects, or pedals. Or, as [David] has done, you could go with a lamp.

[David’s] build is straightforward enough in concept—he just chose a relatively unconventional item to use as a reverb tank. The lamp might seem like an odd choice, but it actually does a decent job at resonating because of its metal construction and the multiple springs that tension the structure. [David] turns the lamp into a reverb by fitting it with a Vidsonix Ghost audio transducer to put sound into the structure—picture the magnetic driver of a loudspeaker without the cone fitted, and you get the idea. Piezo elements were then used as contact mics to pick up reverberations from the lamp itself. Everything was assembled with a bunch of lab stands that give the build a rather nice aesthetic. The reverb time isn’t particularly long, but the sound is hauntingly beautiful.

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An aluminium box is visible on the left side of the image, with a power supply on the right side, and a lamp ballast in the middle. A man's hand is holding the end of an optical fiber in the lower left corner, and it is emitting a white light.

Building A Xenon Lamp For Spectroscopy

November 2, 2025 by 29 Comments

Before a spectrometer can do any useful work, it needs to be calibrated to identify wavelengths correctly. This is usually done by detecting several characteristic peaks or dips in a well-known light source and using these as a reference to identify other wavelengths. The most common reference for hobbyists is the pair of peaks produced by a mercury-vapor fluorescent light, but a more versatile option is a xenon-bulb light source, such as [Markus Bindhammer] made in his latest video.

A xenon gas discharge produces a wide band of wavelengths, which makes it a useful illumination source for absorbance spectroscopy. Even better, Xenon also has several characteristic spikes in the infrared region. For his light source, [Markus] used an H7 xenon bulb meant for a vehicle headlight. The bulb sits in the center of the source, with a concave mirror behind it and a pair of converging lenses in front of it. The converging lenses focus the light onto the end of an optical cable made of PMMA to better transmit UV. A few aluminum brackets hold all the parts in place. The concave mirror is made out of a cut-open section of aluminum pipe. The entire setup is mounted inside an aluminum case, with a fan on one end for cooling. To keep stray light out of the case, a light trap covers the fan’s outlet.

[Markus] hadn’t yet tested the light source with his unique spectrometer, but it looks as though it should work nicely. We’ve seen a wide variety of amateur spectrometers here, but it’s also illuminating to take a look at commercial scientific light sources.

Neon Lamp Detects Lightning Strikes

July 19, 2025 by 16 Comments

For as mysterious, fascinating, and beautiful as lightning is at a distance, it’s not exactly a peaceful phenomenon up close. Not many things are built to withstand millions of volts and tens to hundreds of thousands of amps. Unsurprisingly, there’s a huge amount of effort put into lightning protection systems for equipment and resources that need to be outside where thunderstorms sometimes happen. Although most of us won’t be building personal substations, church steeples, or city-scale water towers in our backyards, we might have a few radio antennas up in the air, so it’s a good idea to have some lightning protection and possibly an alert system like [Joe] built.

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Presenter holds an induction lamp bulb

An Induction Lamp Made On The Same Principle As Ordinary Fluorescent Lamp

July 11, 2025 by 23 Comments

Over on YouTube, [Technology Connections] has a new video: Induction lamps: fluorescent lighting’s final form.

This video is about a wireless fluorescent light which uses induction to transfer power from the electrical system into the lamp. As this lamp doesn’t require wiring it is not prone to “sputtering” as typical fluorescent lights are, thus improving the working life by an order of magnitude. As explained in the video sputtering is the process where the electrodes in a typical fluorescent lamp lose their material over time until they lose their ability to emit electrons at all.

This particular lamp has a power rating of 200 W and light output of 16,000 lumens, which is quite good. But the truly remarkable thing about this type of lighting is its service life. As the lamp is simply a phosphor-coated tube filled with argon gas and a pellet of mercury amalgam it has a theoretically unlimited lifespan. Or let’s call it 23 years.

Given that the service life is so good, why don’t we see induction lamps everywhere? The answer is that the electronics to support them are very expensive, and these days LED lighting has trounced every lighting technology that we’ve ever made in terms of energy efficiency, quality of light, and so on. So induction lamps are obsolete before they ever had their day. Still pretty interesting technology though!

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Touch Lamp Tracks ISS With Style

July 8, 2025 by 8 Comments

In the comments of a recent article, the question came up as to where to find projects from the really smart kids the greybeards remember being in the 70s. In the case of [Will Dana] the answer is YouTube, where he’s done an excellent job of producing an ISS-tracking lamp, especially considering he’s younger than almost all of the station’s major components.*

There’s nothing ground-breaking here, and [Will] is honest enough to call out his inspiration in the video. Choosing to make a ground-track display with an off-the-shelf globe is a nice change from the pointing devices we’ve featured most recently. Inside the globe is a pair of stepper motors configured for alt/az control– which means the device must reset every orbit, since [Willis] didn’t have slip rings or a 360 degree stepper on hand.  A pair of magnets couples the motion system inside the globe to the the 3D printed ISS model (with a lovely paintjob thanks to [Willis’s girlfriend]– who may or may be from Canada, but did show up in the video to banish your doubts as to her existence), letting it slide magically across the surface. (Skip to the end of the embedded video for a timelapse of the globe in action.) The lamp portion is provided by some LEDs in the base, which are touch-activated thanks to some conductive tape inside the 3D printed base.

It’s all controlled by an ESP32, which fetches the ISS position with a NASA API. Hopefully it doesn’t go the way of the sighting website, but if it does there’s more than enough horsepower to calculate the position from orbital parameters, and we are confident [Will] can figure out the code for that. That should be pretty easy compared to the homebrew relay computer or the animatronic sorting hat we featured from him last year.

Our thanks to [Will] for the tip. The tip line is for hackers of all ages,  but we admit that it’s great to see what the new generation is up to.

*Only the Roll Out Solar Array, unless you only count on-orbit age, in which case the Nakua module would qualify as well.

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