This is one of the most satisfying projects I’ve done to date. Thank you @mark14 for sharing your design and @chris1 for your remake and pointers to PixelBlaze. I ended up using Chris’ SVG as I was cutting with PG draftboard. It worked great and I love that it all fit on one board!
I put the lamp together without glue to begin with. I used rubber bands to hold the “frame” (legs and full circles) in place while I worked the “broken” circles into their place. The rubber bands worked well, allowing me to wiggle the pieces into place.
I found hooking up the rubber bands like so worked best…
When I did finally get around to gluing, I just took one vertical piece out at a time and used a toothpick to dab some CA glue in a couple places before sliding the strut back in place.
NOTE: I did not glue the top. It provides a great way to access the inside and I can make decorative tops that can be swapped out depending on mood. IMO the top is only real piece that needs fancy wood and draftboard provides a nice diffuse effect for the LEDs. In addition, since I can access the internals from the top – I’ll be updating the SVG to replace the large hole on the bottom with one just large enough for the power cord.
The PixelBlaze board it great! I’ve been having a lot of fun coming up with custom patterns. I’ll upload some to the PixelBlaze site so others can try then on their own lamp. It is so nice to do coding and updates in real time over WiFi.
I like how you assembled it. Great idea to use the rubber bands.
Agree that pretty wood is only needed on the top. Made a bunch of these with Baltic birch which is my go to basic wood.
Awesome! I’ve made about 5 of these so far; as you said, they are very satisfying. I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time programming different patterns. I’m now porting them to run on a bare ATmega328P. I may go for something even smaller, I like the idea of running the whole thing on a 50 cent chip.
I don’t see how anybody could stop at one! I happened to have two 16x16 matrices lying around, so I did a few modifications to the svg and now my first one has a big sibling.
HDMI implies HDTV which is millions of pixels (1080 = 2,073,600 pixels) This thing has only a few hundred to work with (256 in the small size or 512 if you double the height) . So, this could recreate a tiny corner of the tv screen (smaller than a postage stamp) with full resolution or a very coarse version of the entire screen. Or, as I told my son, watching the avengers on this would reduce the Hulk to one green dot and the rest of the cast would have to share dots.
The operative word implies. HDMI is just another serial protocol and could be any resolution. I see is used to carry low resolution feeds all the time.
There are plenty of HDMI capture solutions though they will by design I suspect not work with any HDCP sources(Most streaming services apps/websites, bluray players, etc)
The pixel blaze mentioned looks like it might be able to do plenty. I guess the question becomes why HDMI and which video source?
You might want to look at HDTV bias lighting projects. One of them must consume HDMI
2 years later and I am still making and selling these lamps. I make both the short ones (the shared design) and tall ones. I changed up the design to have most of the rings/ rungs be made from identical 1/4 sections of a ring. This makes for less sorting and quicker assembly. It also means I can nest them more efficiently for less wasted wood without significantly more laser time.
I have moved away from the off the shelf pattern generators to drive the LEDS and have been using patterns I coded myself on small arduino variants (trinketM0 or similar). The electronics cost about the same either way. In those patterns, I have been playing with a noise function which helps generate patterns that are more organic and less linear. One such is shown in this linked video. Video also shows a variety of clocks and other items in the gallery. That lantern and the larger black clock already sold. (woot!!) After a year of almost zero business due to covid-19, it seems like business is returning.
It’s a fantastic design, and I have to doubly thank you for letting me make a “clone”, as it gave me three really fun projects: the CAD design, electronics, and programming. I have one on my desk to enjoy every day.
Well that’s funny, my mom and I was talking about making something round like this. Instead of a lamp, she thought of something like a pencil holder or something. This will come useful for me to change it up and add my own vision to this. Thank you for sharing!
IMO the top is only real piece that needs fancy wood and draftboard provides a nice diffuse effect for the LEDs. In addition, since I can access the internals from the top – I’ll be updating the SVG to replace the large hole on the bottom with one just large enough for the power cord.
