Building An RGB Mood Lamp Using An IKEA Mylonit

June 3, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

[Toon Beerten] had been experimenting with LED lamp construction. He had already built a pretty neat pyramid of LEDs as a mood lamp but wanted something a little higher quality for his living room. He ran out and picked up an IKEA lamp, which you can see above. From the store, the lamp can only display one color, and has a clear construction. [Toon] wanted RGB and an opaque finish, so he sanded the lamp and built a custom circuit.

He tore out the lamp circuit and replaced it with his own, consisting of a 3W LED, a heatsink, and a PIC 16F628 (and the supporting components). The main circuit actually fits underneath the lamp pretty well. You can download the full schematics and code from his site if you’d like to replicate it.

As you can see in the video, the effect is quite nice.

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Triangle-grid LED Display

May 31, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Dearmash] put together this RGB LED display using triangles for each pixel. It’s an interesting deviation from the traditional grid layout. There are two video demos after the break. The first is a plasma-style pattern generated in Processing. The second is a spinning color wheel which would be perfect if synchronized with your Photoshop color spinner.

So the physical build is done, and now [Dearmash] is looking for a purpose for the device (isn’t that always the way it happens?). He mentions that the triangular layout looks cool, but makes text display almost impossible. Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this work? Right off the bat we could see side-scrolling a font similar to the Metallica logo’s M and A. Bu there must be some way to group these pixels together into readable characters. If you always use an upward and downward pointed triangle on the same row as a pixel it makes a parallelogram which would be used to display italicization characters.

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LED Bicycle Hack Makes Sure You’re Seen At Night

May 31, 2012 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

The bicycle tail and head lights that we’re accustomed to are small add-on modules. This take on the idea uses strips of LEDs to protect you from behind. They’re very bright, matching the pair of LED headlights that are attache to the handlebars.

Apparently [A.Davis12] had some LED strips laying around. There’s not what we’re used to seeing, but they have a similar footprint so you should be able to substitute the kind that come on a spool and may be cut to length. The majority of the build time was spent integrating the lights and their control wires with the frame of the bike. The frame already has holes in it for feeding the control wires for brakes and gear shifting inside the tubing. It sounds like it was a pain, but eventually he managed to get all of the routing done. Two red strips are zip-tied to the back of the seat stays. They are powered by a lithium battery inside the project box which mounts under the back of the saddle. A flip switch on the case lets you turn them on without stopping.

[Thanks Arpad]

A Wedding Cake Made Out Of LEDs

May 28, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

[Andrew] wanted to do something special for his wedding. Since he and his fiance [Missy] decided on a cupcake wedding cake, [Andrew] decided to wow his guests with an RGB LED cupcake holder.

The tiers of [Andrew] and [Missy]’s cupcake holder are made of acrylic laser etched with a damask pattern. These tiers are supported by a cylinder embedded with RGB leds that provide edge lighting for the acrylic panels. The effect is a series of permutating lights that illuminate the cupcake holder with every imaginable color. On the top of the cupcake cake, there’s a great cake topper made of frosted and laser cut acrylic that has the same color fade effect as the cupcake holder.

On the electrical side of things, the cupcake holder has 44 LEDs on all it’s levels. FETs driven by a 40-pin PIC18F control all the LEDs and the whole piece is powered by a computer power supply.

It’s an awesome build, especially considering it was finished just days before the wedding. After the break, you can check out a few more videos showing off the beauty of [Andrew] and [Missy]’s wedding cake.

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Hipster Chandelier

May 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

This chandelier is something we’d expect to see on sale in the local gallery store. [Starkec] made it a couple of years back and we just love the look. The materials are pretty common, and you can throw it together in an afternoon.

The diffuser are made from clear glass soda bottles. After removing the labels and giving them a good cleaning, they were each set upside down and sprayed with some glass frosting spray. A four-conductor telephone wire serves both as the support for the bottle and electrical path for the RGB LED inside of each. The original screw cap for the bottles makes it a twist to install them after the soldering is done. There are two common color buses so that alternating colors can be shown at the same time. After seeing the video we think you’ll agree that the wiring scheme makes for some great animated effects.

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Lighting Up A Runway Into The Garage

May 25, 2012 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[Timo] didn’t want to look like every other lighted driveway but using solar path lights. Instead he decided to light it up as if it were a runway. It’s easy to look at the result as cute and move on to the next hack. But look again. If you were going to do this yourself how would you implement it considering a car will drive over it, and it’s outdoors?

The first issue of protecting this from traffic is actually not too tough in this case. [Timo’s] driveway is made of pavers and is not a solid sheet of asphalt or concrete. He drilled out some of the intersections to make just enough room for each of the PCBs he etched to house the LEDs and host the driver. These boards are inserted horizontally into the sand between the pavers like a fin, with the surface mount LED positioned along the edge. Power and control wires run along each line of lights. They are serial controlled which cuts down on the number of conductors needed. [Timo] didn’t mention weather proofing but we’d suggest casting them in crystal clear resin just like this headphone amplifier.

Hacking Color And Battery Life On A Solar Powered Garden Light

May 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Give your garden lights a little bit more life by changing out the LEDs. In the process, you can also choose a different color if you like. It really is as simple as cracking it open and replacing the stock LED, but a bit of a change may also prolong the stored charge.

These garden lights consist of a small solar cell and an LED, both controlled by a small PCB powered from a NiMH rechargeable battery. Sure, you could try to put in a battery that has more potential, but if you replace the single LED with two of them in series, it drops the current consumption and increase the battery life. Just make sure to use super bright LEDs and the intensity change will not be all that noticeable. That comes partly from the fact that our eyes don’t detect intensity changes as well when a light is already very bright. And since it’s two LEDs, mixing colors is an option as we see above.

[Thanks Ken]