Fiber Optic Lamp Modified To Be Scarily Bright

January 21, 2026 by Lewin Day 15 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.

Continue reading “Fiber Optic Lamp Modified To Be Scarily Bright” →

Building Beautiful LED Lanterns With Black LED Acrylic

December 27, 2025 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

[Geeksmithing] and [When Geeks Craft] recently came together for a glowing collaboration. They wanted to build ever more attractive lanterns for a local parade event. They recently discovered a fantastic material that can really improve the look of whatever project you might be building with LEDs.

The material is commonly referred to as “Black LED Acrylic” or similar. In this case, it was sourced from TAP Plastics, though you can source similar acrylic from other vendors, too. From first glance, it looks like any other piece of black acrylic plastic. However, shine an LED through it, and it will be beautifully diffused and smoothed out to wonderful visual effect. A simple test of a 3×3 array of LEDs behind a 3D-printed grid shows how good this can look. It almost entirely eliminates hot spots, and the result looks like a display built out of juicy glowing cubes. The duo used this material to produce giant pixel art lanterns for their local parade. We only get a glimpse at the final build, but it appears giant Pacman and Blinky totems are on the way.

If you’ve been struggling to find a good way to diffuse the light from LEDs, you might want to give this stuff a try. Alternatively, you might explore some other methods we’ve looked at before, and don’t discount ping pong balls, either.

Continue reading “Building Beautiful LED Lanterns With Black LED Acrylic” →

Print Your Next LED Bezel

December 27, 2025 by Donald Papp 6 Comments

LED bezels (also known as LED panel-mount holders) are great, so how about 3D printing the next ones you need? Sure, they’re inexpensive to purchase and not exactly uncommon. But we all know that when working on a project, one doesn’t always have everything one might need right at hand. At times like that, 3D printing is like a superpower.

Printing a part you find yourself short of can be a lifesaver.

[firstgizmo]’s design is made with 3D printing in mind, and most printers should be able to handle making them. Need something a little different? You’re in luck because the STEP files are provided (something we love to see), which means modifications are just a matter of opening them in your favorite CAD program.

There’s not even any need to export to an STL after making tweaks, because STEP support in slicer programs is now quite common, ever since PrusaSlicer opened that door a few years ago.

Not using 5 mm LEDs, and need some other size? No problem, [firstgizmo] also has 3 mm, 8 mm, and 10 mm versions so that it’s easy to mount those LEDs on a panel. Combined with a tool that turns SVG files into multi-color 3D models, one can even make some panels complete with color and lettering to go with those LEDs. That might be just what’s needed to bring that midnight project to the next level.

Building A Wall-Mounted Sound Visualizer

December 27, 2025 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

Visualizers used to be very much in vogue, something you’d gasp in at amazement when you’d fire up Winamp or Windows Media Player. They’re largely absent from our modern lives, but [Arnov Sharma] is bringing them back. After all, who doesn’t want a cool visualizer hanging on the wall in their living room?

The build is based around the Raspberry Pi Pico 2. It’s paired with a small microphone hooked up to a MAX9814 chip, which amplifies the signal and offers automatic gain control to boot. This is a particularly useful feature, which allows the microphone to pick up very soft and very loud sounds without the output clipping. The Pi Pico 2 picks up the signals from the mic, and then displays the waveforms on a 64 x 32 HUB75 RGB matrix. It’s a typical scope-type display, which allows one to visualize the sound waves quite easily. [Arnov] demonstrates this by playing tones on a guitar, and it’s easy to see the corresponding waveforms playing out on the LED screen.

It’s a fun project, and it’s wrapped up in a slick 3D printed housing. This turns the visualizer into a nice responsive piece of wall art that would suit any hacker’s decor. We’ve featured some other great visualizers before, too. Continue reading “Building A Wall-Mounted Sound Visualizer” →

Windmill Desk Lamp Is Beautifully Soothing

December 19, 2025 by Lewin Day 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.

Continue reading “Windmill Desk Lamp Is Beautifully Soothing” →

Interactive Hopscotch Tiles Make The Game More Exciting

December 18, 2025 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Hopscotch is a game usually played with painted lines or with the aid of a bit of chalk. However, if you desire fancier equipment, you might like the interactive hopscotch setup from [epatell].

The build uses yoga mats as the raw material to create each individual square of the hopscotch board. The squares all feature simple break-beam light sensors that detect when a foot lands in the given space. These sensors are monitored by a Raspberry Pi Pico in each square. In turn, the Pico lights up addressable NeoPixel LED strips in response to the current position of the player.

It’s a simple little project which makes a classic game just a little more fun. It’s also a great learning project if you’re trying to get to grips with things like microcontrollers and addressable LEDs in an educational context. We’d love to see the project taken a step further, perhaps with wirelessly-networked squares that can communicate and track the overall game state, or enable more advanced forms of play.

Meanwhile, if you’re working on updating traditional playground games with new technology, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Giant Neopixel Is Just Like The Regular Kind, Only Bigger

December 15, 2025 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Neopixels and other forms of addressable LEDs have taken the maker world by storm. They make it trivial to add a ton of controllable, glowing LEDs to any project. [Arnov Sharma] has made a great tribute to the WS2812B LED by building the NeoPixel Giant Edition.

The build is simply a recreation of the standard 5mm x 5mm WS2812B, only scaled up to 150 mm x 150 mm. It uses a WS2811 chip inside to make it behave in the same way from a logical perspective, and this controller is hooked up to nine standard RGB LEDs switched with MOSFETs to ensure they can deliver the requisite light output. The components are all assembled on a white PCB in much the same layout as the tiny parts of a WS2812B, which is then installed inside a 3D-printed housing made in white PLA. Large metal terminals were added to the housing, just like a WS2812B, and the lens was then created using a large dose of clear epoxy.

The result is a fully functional, addressable LED that is approximately 30 times larger than the original. You can even daisy-chain them, just like the real thing. We’ve covered all kinds of projects using addressable LEDs over the years, from glowing cubes to fancy nature installations. If you’ve got your own glowable project that the world needs to see, make sure you notify the tips line!