Potion Stand

Here’s the second iteration of my potion stand, a bit of silliness in anticipation of Halloween.

It’s 1/8" black acrylic, friction fit with no glue (a mistake in retrospect — that stuff is brittle). The box is decorated with engraved Tree of Life designs, and houses an Arduino Nano with a little servo that jiggles a magnet under the bottle.

A short strip of addressable LEDs extends from the Arduino, through the lid and up behind the bottle. They’re held in place by two small clips. The contraption is powered by a USB connection or a 9v battery.

The “potion” is alcohol with a pinch of light blue mica powder. A magnetic stir bar in the bottle moves with the servo and magnet underneath, which keeps the powder from settling and separating.

The crappy photography really doesn’t do it justice: it’s a flowing, iridescent, hypnotic fluid, and the flickering blue LEDs make it look electrified, like liquid lightning. And there’s a lot of room for customization. You can change the color and pattern of the lights in combination with the contents of the bottle: pulsing red for seething lava, sparkling pink with glitter hearts for a love potion, undulating green slime, or icy blue with tiny snowflakes for Essence of Minnesota.

This was a prototype, but it came out surprisingly well! I’m tempted to make an entire wizard’s shelf to go with it.

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Thank you for including the video. This is awesome but you are right, the picture does not do it justice.

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Fantastic!

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Go for it! It would be awesome. :+1:

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Wow this is seriously impressive! Looks like it’s direct from Snape’s classroom!

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That’s really cool. I wonder what it would look like with the oil from a lava lamp in the bottle and your led glowing thru it? Hmmm…:thinking:

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Very cool. Servos and LED’s for the win.

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Love it !

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Excellent mix of resources.
Came out very Halloween-y.

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Using a magnet to stir the mica is brilliant!

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That is totally cool!!

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I like everything that lights up. This is really cool!

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Really cool project! Added to my long list of things I wanna try :smiley:

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This is amazing

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Very amazing. Look forward to seeing more…

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Thats pretty amazing. Way to go!

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That is INTENSELY cool!

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Also, I love Essence of Minnesota because I live… yeah, in Minnesota :grin:

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Hey, me too

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