Magic Lamp with wireless charger, Adafruit Trinket & NeoPixels
Fun, glowy AND wireless! Thanks to Frederick Vandenbosch for sending in this magic lamp project. Check out the full build here.
Concept
The idea for this little project is to have a lamp which can be turned on or off simply by moving it on a desk.
A wireless charging base is built into the desk’s surface, and a circuit with microcontroller and LEDs gets powered wirelessly using the charging coil.
Components & Circuit
The electronic components used in this project are the following:
The Qi Wireless Charger was bought on eBay for a couple of euros. According to the specs, it is capable of outputting 5V/1A, which should be more than sufficient for this simple circuit.
Connecting everything together is simple:
the coil’s positive terminal is connected to the Trinket & NeoPixel USB+/PWR pins
the coil’s negative terminal is connected to the Trinket & NeoPixel GND pins
the Trinket’s #0 pin is connected to the NeoPixel IN pin
Adafruit Trinket – Mini Microcontroller – 5V Logic: Trinket may be small, but do not be fooled by its size! It’s a tiny microcontroller board, built around the Atmel ATtiny85, a little chip with a lot of power. We wanted to design a microcontroller board that was small enough to fit into any project, and low cost enough to use without hesitation. Perfect for when you don’t want to give up your expensive dev-board and you aren’t willing to take apart the project you worked so hard to design. It’s our lowest-cost arduino-IDE programmable board! Read more.
NeoPixel Ring – 12 x WS2812 5050 RGB LED with Integrated Drivers: Round and round and round they go! 12 ultra bright smart LED NeoPixels are arranged in a circle with 1.5″ (37mm) outer diameter. The rings are ‘chainable’ – connect the output pin of one to the input pin of another. Use only one microcontroller pin to control as many as you can chain together! Each LED is addressable as the driver chip is inside the LED. Each one has ~18mA constant current drive so the color will be very consistent even if the voltage varies, and no external choke resistors are required making the design slim. Power the whole thing with 5VDC and you’re ready to rock. Read more.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Diving into the Raspberry Pi RP2350, Python Survey Results and more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
