Making an Ikea Mood Lamp Beyond All Repair


Posted on Feb 5, 2014

Since I first got my Arduino and some RGB LEDs I`d wanted to build myself a mood lamp with some funky features (note that I used the word funky and not useful). Well, I`ve finally done it, and here is the blog post describing how. For this project I used the Ikea GrG¶nG¶, which was £4. 99 when I bought it. It quite a nice matt glass finish, which


Making an Ikea Mood Lamp Beyond All Repair
Click here to download the full size of the above Circuit.

helps to diffuse light, and also it comes with the glass shade and the actual light fitting separate from one another (I put the light fitting to one side as I won`t be using it in this project). The brightnesses above were only chosen because they were the highest that were available at a fairly reasonable cost. It might be better to match the brightnesses of all LEDs, although if memory serves, human eyes aren`t as sensitive to blue light as they are red and green, so it might be worth getting a brighter blue LED (I advise doing some more research). Firstly, LEDs tend to be highly directional (i. e most light goes in front of the led). There seem to be lots of diffusing and mixing lenses available at various shops, but I decided I`d have a go at just scuffing the LEDs with some sandpaper. I was quite happy with the diffusion of light after having done that, so my next step was to breadboard the LEDs out. I arranged them into a triangular shape with a common ground rail on the breadboard, and individual positive rails for each diode. Therefore resistors must be added to stop the components from being popped` (trust me, blown up LEDs stink). The required resistance can be easily calculated using Ohms Law V = IR. Although you can`t see it in that video, with only one LED of each colour it was far too hard to see when the surrounding light levels were high so I decided I`d add another led of each colour so they were arranged...




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