“Rings of Saturn” LED Pendant Light with Multiple Display Modes
Mike Clifford from Modustrial Maker shared this over on the Makers, hackers, artists & engineers G+ community and it’s pretty great. His construction process includes a bunch of tips & tricks for thinking through the build itself, from the spacing of things to using a combination of tools to solve design issues. And the end result looks fantastic!
I made this LED pendant light from plywood, LED strips, and flexible LED channel. Since I designed this for my living room, the music syncing had to be incognito. With this in mind, I used warm white / cool white / amber LED strips, instead of RGB strips. In solid white mode, the rings give off various shades of white for a sophisticated modern look that hides the wild side when you switch the light to music visualizer mode.
The build is fairly simple. Each of the two rings is made of a stack of three plywood rings, where the middle ring has a lesser radius to create a groove for the LEDs. The rings are simple to cut using a circle cutting jig and router. While I programmed an Arduino Mega to do music visualization based on input from a microphone, you can very easily buy an off-the-shelf music controller for individually controllable LEDs, which is basically plug n’ play for the LED strips.
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