The Bytelight

Make a high-tech mood light from a flourescent lamp and a bunch of old memory chips.
Thanks go to Ross Orr for the original article in
MAKE MAGAZINE Volume 09

Step 1 What You Need...

1. Some old memory chips. However many you use will determine the size of the Bytelight you build. I used 3 rows of 21, 256K 30 pin SIMMS that I bought as a bulk lot on Ebay.

2. A piece of plexiglass or Lexan. Mine was 12" X 12"

3. Plywood or other wood about 1/2" thick

4. Sheet metal. I used some galvanized sheet metal. Anything reflective will work. You could probably get away with using aluminum foil.

5. Glue. You can use any glue that will work with wood, metal and plastic.

6. Light fixture, lamp cord and flourescent bulb. Any home improvement store will have these or just salvage them from an old garage sale lamp.

7. Assorted screws.

Comments

[TheGreatS]

I love the name!

[geekdude]

it seems to me that you would get more light out of the thing if you desoldered the chips. than again that would take a long time, mabye if you used a blowtorch? i wonder if old motherboards are semi transparent.

[IW5 Industries]

how do i subscribe to make?

[LuminousObject]

Go into the iTunes store. In the little search bar, type in Make, scroll down to the podcast section, click on Make, and in the next screen, there should be a button kind of towards the middle that says subscribe, and click on it. ITunes will start downloading it, and then you just have to wait for it to finish. It will automatically download new ones.

[IW5 Industries]

wow thats like the fastest reply ever! i posted that 20 mins ago!!!

[albylovesscience]

lol

[TheDeviant13]

16 minutes

[IW5 Industries]

and thank you

[LuminousObject]

No problem.

[favordealseo]

(removed by author or community request)

[macemaster0426]

If you put an LED that you could minipulate the color of it would be more of a "mood light" don't u think?

[russ_hensel]

You have neglected to say how fast the memory has to be. Is faster brighter, or the other way around?

[Koolraap]

is has to have at least 2 MB of fastness per chip, unless you are using more that 73 chips, than they have to be at least 3 MB of fastness

[jessiminica]

Is it sad that it took me until your post about millennium bugs to be sure you were joking? :p

[Koolraap]

only if you don't have the millennium bug :P

[ste5442]

Does it remember when you last turned the lights on, or do you need more memory for that ;-)

PCBPolice Electronics Forum

[Yerboogieman]

Actually it is RAM (Random Access Memory) so it forgets everytime. ;-)

[Koolraap]

depend whether your chips have the millenium bug, if more than 49% have the milennium bug I only remembers when the last time was you turned it off

[DIY Dave]

Cool

[geeklord]

Funny, i was looking at the Arduino All-in-One Getting Started Guide and in the little thing that pops up in the YouTube player that shows you all the related videos, this came up! I might make a miniature version of this with some LED's and a few chips.

[comodore]

Great job! As always... :D What is your favorite auction house?

[ste5442]

Sotheby's.

PCBPolice Electronics Forum

[comodore]

The question was for Kip Kay, but..never mind... :D

[cantthinkof bettername]

It wold be cool to make a whole computer into a wall mounted light, and have it still work.

[ste5442]

Nice idea but the internal planes within the PCB would block the light through it :-(

PCBPolice Electronics Forum

[harari]

i tried doing this with some SDRAMs but they have so much copper in more than one layer that there's no light going through. :( looks like a cool project anyway... well done !

[VagsmaCutter]

I think I'm gonna do this, but I'm going to take this spinning mirror thing I got out of a scanner/printer and use a green laser for the light and use the magnifying plexi from a rear screen projection tv instead of just plain plexi. I think it might help my baby brother get to sleep faster, if he stared at it.

[chrisayad]

i hope you dont get cancer

[paulpcc]

thats pretty good :) i keep holding on to old chips and cpus and drives after seeing someone hook up 100+ usb devices and motherboards and other bits of pc equipment to make a network of 1 actual computer with an operating system of some kind using all parts... but i lost the link so i might just go ahead and make a bytelight :)

[cflowers]

Another great hack, Kipkay! I had to feature this one on The Daily Hack. Keep on hacking, modding, and building brother! :-)

Charlie Flowers
DailyHack.net
twitter.com/ctrflowers

[0xCyrusx0]

Great idea! I happen to have access to a large amount of DDR-1 RAM which is probably going to be junked soon (School, our computer construction class finally got something better than pentium III and Celerons to take apart). I'll probably end up making a much smaller version, say a tall rectangle with a heavy wood base using about 2 sticks per side.

[noj4888]

What is your favorite auction site?

[JellyWoo]

yeah, what is it?

[micromuffin]

Yeah, what is it?

[dark sponge]

Yeah, what is it?

[tipsychimp]

Yeah, what is it?

[jokerlz]

Cough Ebay..cough ahem who said that? hmm was that a sound? I didn't hear anything!

[dark sponge]

*COUGH!* *AHEM!*

*COUGH!* *COUGH!*

*COUGH!*

[noj4888]

Maybe ebay, but I like liquidation but I'm near one.

[dark sponge]

Sometime in the future, when people have computers with petabytes of memory, they might do this with old terrabyte memory chips. Strange thing to think about...