This article describes how to make your own mains powered mood light (Also known as led washing light or rainbow light). It is a harmless device which, if used in the way it was meant, can do no harm to anyone. It can give your dark, damp, computerized room a nice glowing tint.

In action:

Step 1: The PCB and Other Parts

What will you need:

A assembled PCB of the mood light, found here
A rain pipe
Some kind of light diffusing piece of plastic (i used a small plastic container thingy they give you when you get Chinese food (filled with sambal doh).
A big light diffusing bowl, of other fishbowl shaped object. or omit that and just let the light shine on your wall, as a projector.

First make sure you PCB looks something like the picture below.

As you can see i mounted a small PCB with three RGB LEDs at a angle of 90 degrees and mounted the sambalgizmo on that. In the original schematics you wont see it this way, it does require some improvisation. and of course you need to slightly modify the schematic for you led(s). but this should be no problem for a novice geek. As you can see on the pictures, I have already soldered a switch on the pcb and clipped on the power, this was pure for testing and have to be removed later. A tip for building: Test after every step you take, or else you will get really pissed and smash that damn thing against the wall, Really.. Believe me.

Step 2: The Fishbowl

Now you can glue the bowl thing on the piece of rain pipe and let it dry for 24 hours. Meanwhile you can build the pcb, if you haven't already.

Step 3: Glueing It Together

After doing that, you can glue the pcb in the pipe using a hot glue gun. Like this:

Step 4: Rectification

Time to make a small rectifier to rectify the power coming out of your transformer (which you will build in later). I used a bridge rectifier and a capacitor to make a a nice little compact rectifier. As seen below.

Connect the rectifier to a suitable transformer and connect the output of the rectifier to the pcb.

Step 5: The Control Panel

Cut one of the two wires coming from the rectifier and insert a switch between the wires. Drill holes for the two buttons (The mode button and the power switch) and connect everything.