I got into mandalas right as the covid thing hit. My wife eventually asked me what I was going to do with them all (I have amassed quite pile of them). That is when this idea hit me. Sized so that I did not have to use the passthrough but big enough to work. 8 sided (6 sides + top and bottom) Inside there are 3 LED panels 16 x 15 leds each (total of 768 leds). Small trinket M0 board from adafruit drives them. The mandalas are 4 layers thick to allow the openings to be large enough to pass some light. Stand is a hacked ikea lamp , I believe the holmo model. I used cheap printer paper to defuse the light.
By default, it randomly cycles through about 20 patterns. It has a rotary encoder/ switch to allow the user to set the brightness, pick the color, pick a single pattern or have it cycle, select if the colors within the pattern change or not. That part mostly works. I like the random pattern, cycling colors at default brightness anyway. yep the house is a mess. i blame the 3 year old. He blames me.
I’m working on a somewhat less awesome lantern driven by an Arduino Nano, which I hope to wire up tomorrow, time permitting. I opted for a capacitive sensor on the top instead of a rotary encoder, because I always loved touch-switches on lamps when I was a kid. Magic!
I have a 5 V, 10 A supply. Running them at 1/2 brightness by default and the code never lets it go full white. Methinks this limits worst case to ~1/4 of potential current draw. I wired it so that each panel is powered directly to minimize voltage drop across the array.
Not as bright as one might think. If i allowed it to make full white, it would be very bright but i like rich colors which tend to only use 2 of the 3 colors at a time and only one of them at full strength. On top of that, i limit brightness to 50%.
Here is a time-lapse video of it. My cell phone camera does not pick up the richness of the color well . It changes rather slowly so real time video look a lot like a photo unless one is very patient.