The Bright Side Of The Moon Lamp: It’s Any Colour You Like

February 8, 2021 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

One of the easiest ways to get into hardware hacking is by piecing together a few modules and shoehorning them into a really cool home. For example, why buy a commercial moon lamp when you can spend 30+ hours printing your own, and a few more hours hacking the guts together?

[Amit_Jain] was inspired by a project that combined a color map and bump map of the moon into a highly-detailed printable model. Displeased with the lack of features like portability and pretty colors, [Amit] took it to the next level by designing a threaded cap that unscrews to show the streamlined guts of an off-the-shelf RGB LED controller.

[Amit] freed the controller board from its plastic box and soldered the LED strip’s wires directly to it. For power, [Amit] taped the board to the battery from an old cell phone and stepped it up to 12 V with a boost converter. We think this looks quite nice and professional, especially with the stand. A brief demo is on the rise after the break.

If you’ve got the room for a much, much larger light-up moon, you should go for it.

Continue reading “The Bright Side Of The Moon Lamp: It’s Any Colour You Like” →

Transmit Your Gaze To This Fiber Optic LED Lamp

February 3, 2021 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

Call us easily amused, but we think it’s pretty amazing what can be done with a microcontroller, some RGB LEDs, and a little bit of plastic. Case in point is [andrei.erdei]’s beautiful and quite approachable fiber optic LED lamp. It’s a desktop-friendly version of a similar piece [andrei] made that is roughly nine times the size of this one and hangs on the wall. The build may be simple, but the product is intricately lovely.

We really like the visual density of this lamp — it’s just the right amount of tubes and strikes a balance between being too sparse and too chaotic. As you might expect, there’s an Arduino and some RGB LED strips involved. But the key to this build is in the 16 pieces of side-glow plastic fiber optic tubing. Side-glow is designed to let light escape along the length of the tube as opposed to end-glow, which is made to minimize light loss from one end to the other like a data pipe. This allows for all sorts of fun effects, and you can watch [andrei.erdei] go slowly and soothingly through the different colors and modes in the demo video after the break. Make sure you watch long enough to see the tubes move like the old Windows 3D pipes screensaver

Already have too many knickknacks and wall hangings? You’re missing out on prime real estate — the ceiling. Check out this fiber optic ceiling installation that reacts to music.

Continue reading “Transmit Your Gaze To This Fiber Optic LED Lamp” →

One Way To Get Rid Of That Fluorescent Buzzing Sound

January 4, 2015 by James Hobson 38 Comments

Tired of the persistent hum his fluorescent desk lamp made, [Andres Lorvi] decided he had to fix it. And by fix, we mean get rid of altogether. He liked the lamp though so he decided to convert it to LED — that way he’d save some money on electricity too!

Besides wanting to get rid of the hum, [Andres] had also been reading up on the effect of light temperature at night — bluish light is typically bad for your eyes when you’re trying to go to sleep. So he also took this opportunity to change the color temperature of the light in his room. Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as just replacing the fluorescent with the LEDs — no, that would be far too easy…

Continue reading “One Way To Get Rid Of That Fluorescent Buzzing Sound” →