Spaceship Lamp

This one had a few names over the years. It started out as "gardenhose" because of the way I built it.

The bottom is an old hanging lamp I picked up at the local Salvation Army Thrift Store for a smile. I gave it a new paint job (I wasn't fond of the nicotine stain theme it came with), and replaced the electronics inside. The bulb socket in the center is a regular 110v e26 base (with a wifi-controllable led bulb inside, of course) that is used for task lighting or gaming. There is also a 64 led (ws2812b) ring on the underside of the shade that can be controlled independently from the bulb as an accent light. In addition, the globe at the top (which I cut out of an old kids toy and hot glued to the top of the lamp) has an armature wire scaffold inside which supports a length of rubber garden hose about 8" long. Around this hose (which has a slight curve, giving it a bit of a banana shape) I tightly wound an LED strip from bottom to top (around 80 to a hundred total). This could also be controlled independently from the other two light sources. This guy looked really cool in person. The pictures really don't do it justice.

The colors morphed and blended very slowly and subtly. I've sped up some of the videos below so you don't have to sit for 5 minutes watching it. This one hung above our gaming table in our kitchen for years. It is currently out of service, but I have all the parts and plan on rebuilding it. The diffuser globe on top is amazing at grabbing color and I want another opportunity to make use of it. It doesn't light up the area around it much (although the bottom section definitely does), the color hits the inside surface of the globe and just lights it up.

The shape of the lamp was absolutely inspired by UFOs. Specifically the ones commonly blamed for cow abductions. This one has a much bigger dome at the top, presumably to hold more cows.

The high density led strip (the strip wrapped around the hose is of the 144 leds per meter variety) projects a ton of light and very rich colors. The diffuser plastic shows bright saturated colors, even in full daylight.

I built this one before I was comfortable working with mains voltage, so it actually had two separate power rails. One was 110v AC to power the standard bulb (running down one side of the chain from the ceiling). The other side had 5v DC, powering the LEDs and ESP8266 attached to the underside of the saucer section. My son and I had to belly crawl through insulation in our attic to install the transformer and feed the wires down from above. Sure was a pretty light, though.

We moved our gaming table into a dedicated tabletop room downstairs after our kids moved out. I plan on reinstalling this one down there, above the table where it belongs.

This article is part of a series on LED Art as I attempt to document all of the different LED projects I have built over the years.
More will be added as time goes on. The list of currently available articles can be found here: https://dzw.zentormey.com/tag/leds/