Make PPE milk bottles into good looking LED lights, and use an Arduino to control them. This recycles a number of things, mainly the milk bottles, and uses a very low amount of power: the LEDs apparently dissipate less than 3 watts but are bright enough to see by.
Among other things, I wanted to see if I could make an electronic light feel more human friendly than most, and found rotary controllers are a good way of doing this.
PPE milk bottles make for a cheap yet aesthetically pleasing way to diffuse LED lighting. Especially if you can find nice round ones :)
Modding an object with LED lighting is not only environmentally friendly, but also much more straightforward than building a housing from scratch. Because LEDs are tiny, you can put them almost anywhere, and they don't produce much heat as long as they're spread out and running at the correct voltage.
This instructable will deal mainly with physical design and production, and I'm going to assume you have a basic knowledge of creating electronic circuits and LED lighting. Since the exact LEDs and power supply you use will probably vary, I'll only go into the basics of my circuit in terms of specs. I'll also try to point you to useful resources, and explain more about the Arduino microcontroller and code that tells them to work in sequence.
The electronics of basic LED lighting are really simple, similar to elementary school electronics, so probably won't take long for you to pick up at all.
Among other things, I wanted to see if I could make an electronic light feel more human friendly than most, and found rotary controllers are a good way of doing this.
PPE milk bottles make for a cheap yet aesthetically pleasing way to diffuse LED lighting. Especially if you can find nice round ones :)
Modding an object with LED lighting is not only environmentally friendly, but also much more straightforward than building a housing from scratch. Because LEDs are tiny, you can put them almost anywhere, and they don't produce much heat as long as they're spread out and running at the correct voltage.
This instructable will deal mainly with physical design and production, and I'm going to assume you have a basic knowledge of creating electronic circuits and LED lighting. Since the exact LEDs and power supply you use will probably vary, I'll only go into the basics of my circuit in terms of specs. I'll also try to point you to useful resources, and explain more about the Arduino microcontroller and code that tells them to work in sequence.
The electronics of basic LED lighting are really simple, similar to elementary school electronics, so probably won't take long for you to pick up at all.
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Signing UpStep 1: Tools and Materials
To manufacture the lights themselves, you will need:
PPE milk bottles
Sheet of 3mm clear acrylic
2 core electrical cable (or speaker wire will do - it can be fairly light duty since it will only take about 12v and very little current, depending on how you design your circuit).
LEDs
Resistors
Solder
Heat shrink tubing
An old transformer (wall wart to Americans), plus socket+plug to go with it.
Braided copper wire
Solid core bell wire
Zip ties
Tools you will need:
Drill
Hole cutter (matched to the width of your milk bottle caps - see step 2)
Assorted tiny drill bits
Junior hacksaw (depending on what you use as a housing)
Screwdrivers
Wire strippers
Side cutters/Wire clippers
Soldering iron
Multimeter
Third hand (vital for soldering components together)
Desoldering wick (if you salvage any components from other devices)
Crocodile clip leads (for testing/prototyping).
You also might want to make some kind of housing for them. I've tried various ways of hanging them, and settled on a bent section of PVC pipe, hung from the ceiling with holes drilled for the cables. I also tried stapling them to the ceiling. You could also hang them through a piece of board mounted on the ceiling, from conduit, or even make holes in your ceiling itself to accommodate the wires and power them from a loft. Step 5 shows and talks about a few of these options.
The above is all you'll need to make some lights that work with a basic on/off switch. To give them more advanced functions such as fading or sequencing, you'll also need a load of components such as transitors and a microcontroller:
Arduino mini
Mini USB adapter for above, or FTDL USB to header lead.
Pin header sockets
Solderless breadboard
LM317T voltage regulator
BC337 NPN transistors
All shown below but more about them and how they work together in step 6.
There's also an enclosure for switch box, which could be anything you like. I saw a lovely round sacrament box in the Japan room at the British Museum, but they wouldn't let me have it. In the end I used a white plastic moo card box because it fits so well with the theme :)
With such a circuit in place, there are all kinds of things you can program an arduino to do with it. I like kinetic lighting, but I find flashing christmas lights, etc., gaudy and mechanical. Their regularity and consistency is cold and unwelcoming (it must take work to create the naturalistic twinkle of good christmas lights).
I don't want anything flashy (literally). I want a single, analogue control for the lights that feels very human-operated, that simply sequences the way they turn on and off. Code for that, coupled with a nice feeling dial and an aesthetically pleasing aluminium knob makes this into a pleasing toy.
PPE milk bottles
Sheet of 3mm clear acrylic
2 core electrical cable (or speaker wire will do - it can be fairly light duty since it will only take about 12v and very little current, depending on how you design your circuit).
LEDs
Resistors
Solder
Heat shrink tubing
An old transformer (wall wart to Americans), plus socket+plug to go with it.
Braided copper wire
Solid core bell wire
Zip ties
Tools you will need:
Drill
Hole cutter (matched to the width of your milk bottle caps - see step 2)
Assorted tiny drill bits
Junior hacksaw (depending on what you use as a housing)
Screwdrivers
Wire strippers
Side cutters/Wire clippers
Soldering iron
Multimeter
Third hand (vital for soldering components together)
Desoldering wick (if you salvage any components from other devices)
Crocodile clip leads (for testing/prototyping).
You also might want to make some kind of housing for them. I've tried various ways of hanging them, and settled on a bent section of PVC pipe, hung from the ceiling with holes drilled for the cables. I also tried stapling them to the ceiling. You could also hang them through a piece of board mounted on the ceiling, from conduit, or even make holes in your ceiling itself to accommodate the wires and power them from a loft. Step 5 shows and talks about a few of these options.
The above is all you'll need to make some lights that work with a basic on/off switch. To give them more advanced functions such as fading or sequencing, you'll also need a load of components such as transitors and a microcontroller:
Arduino mini
Mini USB adapter for above, or FTDL USB to header lead.
Pin header sockets
Solderless breadboard
LM317T voltage regulator
BC337 NPN transistors
All shown below but more about them and how they work together in step 6.
There's also an enclosure for switch box, which could be anything you like. I saw a lovely round sacrament box in the Japan room at the British Museum, but they wouldn't let me have it. In the end I used a white plastic moo card box because it fits so well with the theme :)
With such a circuit in place, there are all kinds of things you can program an arduino to do with it. I like kinetic lighting, but I find flashing christmas lights, etc., gaudy and mechanical. Their regularity and consistency is cold and unwelcoming (it must take work to create the naturalistic twinkle of good christmas lights).
I don't want anything flashy (literally). I want a single, analogue control for the lights that feels very human-operated, that simply sequences the way they turn on and off. Code for that, coupled with a nice feeling dial and an aesthetically pleasing aluminium knob makes this into a pleasing toy.
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This reminds me of a project my friend's dad made, which involved lights placed under inverted plastic 4 litre ice cream buckets. The string of lights were left beside the sidewalk before winter so that snow would cover them, and they'd light the snowbank from below. It would look awesome to add individual addressing and control as you did!
You might also want to look into straight AVRs (start !). They're just as easy (almost) to work with as arduino, but 6X cheaper and 1000X more flexible (just a chip, not a board). In addition, with the combination of ladyada's USBTinyisp, you'll be able to get that easy usb -> milklights that you're looking for.
If you'd like advice with that, just shoot me a pm, but great work, and congrats!
I just did a quick test with PWM on the bottles connected to the right pins:
I've put the code up as a text file in the last step too (PWMtest-milklights.txt) if you want to look at it. However, don't learn code from me; I'm a beginner and have been told I use way too many curly brackets :)
Also, the Arduino environment contains a much more straightforward example of PWM using a single pin in File > Sketchbook > Examples > Analog > Fading
great instructable, keep up the good work.
http://students.washington.edu/acleone/codes/tlc5940arduino/html_r012/
Thanks,
Joe]
http://photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/photos-ak-sf2p/v166/99/109/573224364/n573224364_518937_6813.jpg
A breathing light would be fairly simple with PWM, though a standard arduino only has 6 PWM pins. Maybe you could get around that by routing the output of one pin to more than one bottle, then blocking with transistors for ones you want off at any time... that wouldn't allow you to control all simultaneously without some being perfectly in synch though.
I made a little demo of PWM with an RGB LED:
I added a heatsink to the LM317 today just to be on the safe side. Aiming to get more video/images of the finished light too, but have to find a way to get it the 3 miles or so back to my house now :)