Star Wars Night Light With Linocut and Arduino

This time I wanted to do another picture frame project and again with a simple arduino controlled LED-light. Since I had stuff for linocutting lying around, I thought it would be nice to illuminate a handprinted pattern.

Videolink

Things I used for this project (listed in order of the appearance in the video)

• Linoplate
• Cutting tools
• White paper
• Inkroller
• Ink
• Glass plate (or other flat surface)
• IKEA picture frame
• Saw
• Hammer
• Pliers
• Duct tape
• Hot air gun
• 2 acrylic tubes (in my case 4mm diameter an 100mm long)
• Punch pliers
• Arduino Nano
• Solder
• Resistors
• Wire
• 2 red LED’s
• Perfboard
• Battery

Step 1: Linocutting

I startet with lining out the pattern so that I easily could trace the lines in the linoleum plate, followed by removing every part I did not want to be printed. After that, I poured some ink on a glass plate and rolled it evenly on the linoleum plate. Then, I placed a piece of paper over the linoleum and pressed it firmly down. Linocut done.

Step 2: Taking Apart the Frame

In the original state, the frame is designed to have the passepartout either directly sitting on the glass or with a distance of 2.5 cm to the glass. Since I needed both, a little space between the glass and the passepartout as well as behind the passepartout I had to saw each piece of the spacer to ⅓ and ⅔. After that I just attached the spacer pieces again with black duct tape. Works fine.

Step 3: Bending the Tubes

I wanted to have some kind of lightsaber on both sides of the passepartout I slightly bent two acrylic tubes with a heat gun and made two corresponding holes so the tubes fit snugly. Now the two LED can illuminate the tubes from the backside. For the handle I used some heat shrink tubing… I had no idea how to do this better.

Step 4: Preparing the Simple Circuit

After some easy prototyping (and I am still very new to programming and stuff) I used the original “Fade” demo-sketch provided by the Arduino IDE and added a second LED to the code, so that both LED will fade in the same way. I think there are different ways to do this, but it works for me. Since the test went well, I soldered everything to a perboard just to make it more durable.

Step 5: Final Assembly

After all these steps done, it was time for putting it back together. I glued the LED’s on the “hidden end” of the acrylic tubing and the perfboard to the frame. As a last step I decided to glue a battery pack to the back panel, so that I do not have to drag a cable around.

Initially my focus was on making the following video for this project, so I do not have more photos of the building process - please accept my apologies for this. It was just my second instructable :-)

Thank you for reading and your time watching the video. I hope you like it.