Commanding Chaos for Coworking, Open Source and Creative Communities

LED Mood Lamp

Thu, 07/05/2012 - 22:12 -- rprice

I found a frosted glass globe replacement thing for a wall sconce or lamp or something. It looked cool, wasn’t too large, and screamed to have a bunch of LEDs stuffed inside it. I was at Home Depot for something else, of course, but I bought the globe, anyway.

Next, I had to figure out how to illuminate the inside of this thing and make it do more than just cycle through colors. The first thing I did was devise a plane for the “bulb.” I decided to go with a dodecagon, which I believe means a 12-sided object. Actually, I had no idea what one of these things was called. I just figured that I needed pentagons to make something more globe-like than a cube. I wanted light to emanate outward from this bulb thing like a light bulb, but with as few sides as possible. The sides were no doubt going to be PCBs, so the less complex, the better. Not that this wasn’t one of the most complex circuit boards I’ve ever built in my short time as a hobbyist circuit builder.