Neat Techniques To Make Interactive Light Sculptures

December 7, 2025 by Lewin Day 21 Comments

[Voria Labs] has created a whole bunch of artworks referred to as Lumanoi Interactive Light Sculptures. A new video explains the hardware behind these beautiful glowing pieces, as well as the magic that makes their interactivity work.

The basic architecture of the Lumanoi pieces starts with a custom main control board, based around the ESP-32-S3-WROOM-2. It’s got two I2C buses onboard, as well as an extension port with some GPIO breakouts. The controller also has lots of protection features and can shut down the whole sculpture if needed. The main control board works in turn with a series of daisy-chained “cell” boards attached via a 20-pin ribbon cable. The cable carries 24-volt power, a bunch of grounds, and LED and UART data that can be passed from cell to cell. The cells are responsible for spitting out data to addressable LEDs that light the sculpture, and also have their own microcontrollers and photodiodes, allowing them to do all kinds of neat tricks.

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Electronic Dice Built The Old Fashioned Way

December 6, 2025 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

If you wanted to build an electronic dice, you might grab an Arduino and a nice OLED display to whip up something fancy. You could even choose an ESP32 and have it log your rolls to the cloud. Or, you could follow the lead of [Axiometa] and do it the old-school way.

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DIY Light Panels Work With Home Assistant

November 29, 2025 by Lewin Day 2 Comments

There are a few major companies out there building colorful LED panels you can stick on your wall for aesthetic purposes. Most commercial options are pretty expensive, and come with certain limitations in how they can be controlled. [Smart Solutions For Home] has whipped up a flexible DIY design for decorating your walls with light that is altogether more customizable.

In this case, the DIY light panels ape the hexagonal design made popular by brands like Nanoleaf. In this case, each hexagon panel runs an ESP32 microcontroller, which controls a series of WS2812 addressable LEDs. This allows each panel to glow whatever color you like, and they’re arranged in an XY grid to enable you to light individual panels with a range of different geometric effects. The benefit of having a full microcontroller on each panel is that they can act quite independently—each one able to be used as a smart light, an notification display, or even as a physical button, all integrated with Home Assistant.

If you’re a fan of DIY smart home products, these might be right up your alley. They’re supremely flexible and customizable, and can do a lot of things that commercial versions can’t easily replicate. Just don’t ignore the fact that they require a considerable amount of assembly, what with the custom PCBs, 3D printed enclosures, and front diffusers to deal with. That’s just the way the LED wall crumbles.

We’ve seen other similar builds before, too. Why? The simple fact is that a lot of people want cool glowy panels on their wall without having to pay through the nose for them.

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A Flexible Light Inspired By IKEA

November 29, 2025 by Jenny List 15 Comments

The IKEA SMÅSNÖRE is a flexible silicone rod with an embedded LED strip, attached at each end to a base. It’s eye-catching enough, and it has the useful property of providing a diffuse light from multiple angles that makes it a promising candidate for a work lamp. That’s enough for [Daniel James] to create his own lamp on a similar vein.

The electronics of his lamp are straightforward enough: a 12 volt LED strip whose brightness is controlled by a Pi Pico in response to a potentiometer as a brightness control. It’s not quite stiff enough to form the arch itself, so he’s created a 3D printed chain that forms the structure of the lamp. Similar to a bicycle chain in the way it’s constructed, it has individual links that slot together and pivot. The electronics are in the printed base at one end.

We like this lamp a lot, for the light it gives on the bench and for the ingenuity of the printed chain. We might even make one for ourselves.

Build A Stranger Things Wall You Can Freak Out At In Your Own Home

November 19, 2025 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

When Stranger Things premiered in 2016, it was a cultural force. Foreign DJs gushed over the lush 80s soundtrack, fashionistas loved the clothing, and the world became obsessed with the idea of using Christmas lights to communicate across material planes. [kyjohnso] has recreated that experience with the technology of today.

If you haven’t watched the show — Joyce Byers is trying to communicate with her son Will, who just so happens to be stuck in another plane of existence called the Upside Down. She screams questions at her living room wall, upon which hangs a series of Christmas lights, marked with the letters A to Z. Will is able to communicate back by causing the lights to flash, one letter at a time.

This build works a little differently. You basically type a message into a terminal on a Raspberry Pi, and it gets sent to a large language model—namely, the Claude API. The response from Claude (or Will Byers, if you’re imagining) is then flashed out on a WS2812B set of LED Christmas lights on the wall. [kyjohnso] added dramatic pauses whenever there’s a space in the output, somewhat replicating the dramatic elements of the show itself. Files are on GitHub for the spooky and curious.

It’s a neat build that would be a hit at any Halloween party. We can’t imagine how much more immersive it would be if paired with a speech-to-text engine so you could actually scream at the thing like a distraught Midwestern parent who has just lost her youngest child. It’s all about committing to the bit; if you build such a thing, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Light An LED With Nothing

November 12, 2025 by Jenny List 11 Comments

Should you spend some time around the less scientifically informed parts of the internet, it’s easy to find “Free power” stories. Usually they’re some form of perpetual motion machine flying in the face of the laws of conservation of energy, but that’s not to say that there is no free power.

The power just has to come from somewhere, and if you’re not paying for it there’s the bonus. [joekutz] has just such a project, lighting up LEDs with no power source or other active electronics.

Of course, he’s not discovered perpetual motion. Rather, while an LED normally requires a bit of current to light up properly, it seems many will produce a tiny amount of light on almost nothing. Ambient electromagnetic fields are enough, and it’s this effect that’s under investigation. Using a phone camera and a magnifier as a light detector he’s able to observe the feeble glow as the device is exposed to ambient fields.

In effect this is using the LED as the very simplest form of radio receiver, a crystal set with no headphone and only the leads, some wires, and high value resistors as an antenna. The LED is after all a diode, and it can thus perform as a rectifier. We like the demonstration even if we can’t quite see an application for it.

While we’re no longer taking new entries for the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge, we’ve still got plenty of creative hacks from the competition to show off. We’re currently tabulating the votes, and will announce the winners of this particularly lively challenge soon.