sTEAMpUNKS
Acrylic laser cut lamps
These lamps I started making for people when I forgot to buy them a gift congratulating them for yet another year of survuval. Apparently that's been happening a lot lately :)
They are also available in my shop
They are made from:-
Lasercut box (I use Bamboo Ply ,cause it's sexy)
The engraved Acrylic feature, I use 6mm.
less than 10cm WS2812 LED strip(or adafruit neopixel), 300 leds/m.
An arduino, the smaller it is the smaller your box can be!
A potentiometer
A 5.5x2.1mm DC power jack
wire.
You will need access to a laser cutter, Hot glue gun, soldering iron and wire cutters.
I think that's all...
The base
It is a simple lasercut box. BoxMaker will save you a lot of time. Just Download your box template, figure out which side is which and add holes for the DC jack, the pot and the acrylic. Astro boy's base is 45mm wide and 6mm thick, so that's the size of the slot int he top!
Anything sticky will do to assemble the box. I use black hot glue, I find it's the best for blocking gaps in the joins (tiny cracks let out light) and because it's thick there's a very low risk it will run and somehow get on the outside surface of the wood. If I get any glue on the outside of the box I re cut the part, I like them to look neat and clean.
Here is the file I cut for my boxes.
the magic
This is the tricky part that makes it all work.
The circuit consists of the LED strip, the power jack the pot and the arduino. I have a custom PCB made for my lamps but if you are only planning to make one then it's easier to just solder all the connections yourself.
the power jack is connected to the + and - rails on the arduino, the LED strip and the pot.
The Arduino is connected to the middle pin on the pot via an analog in and the data pn on the LED strip via a digital out.
ont he image to the right, the pins fromthe pot are sticking through tiny holes on the right. The oprgange wires are data to the pot and to the LED strip. The LED strip is glud to the bottom of the acrylic.
The Arduino is a Pro Mini.
The talent
FInally you need the Arduino code!
I'm generally known as the worst coder in the unverse, so pretty much everything I say on the topic should be taken with a grain of salt...
This code is a crude modification of the Adafruit Neopixel library examples. You should download and install their library from here.
All you should need to worry about are these lines at the top
int sensorPin = A0;
int stripPin = 9;
Change them to whichever pins you used for your lamp, upload it and bask in the rainbow glow of victory!
The star
The acrylic itself is just a rastor (BMP, JPG) image engraved into clear acrylic and then cut out. Open your image in your favourite vector graphics program and trace about 2mm outsde the raster image to create the cut line.
Glue the LED strip to the bottom of the acrylic inside the box.
I solder a plug on mine because that's easier with the PCB, but you can just wire yours in directly. You can use other strip if you like, but it probably won't work with my code so you are on your own there.
The reason I use the relatively expensive addressable strip is it runs from a 5v source and one data pin. I could achieve the same result with 12v RGB strip for much cheaper but I'd have to deal with a less convenient power supply and run mosfets on 3 PWM pin to control it. In this case it's worth paying the few $$ extra for the addressable strip.