Introduction: Useless Box Moody Light Mod

About: Hands on lad with the ability of making something from nothing, sometimes!

So we've all no doubt heard of and seen these useless boxes before. There's loads of clips on youtube of wonderful and wacky variations of them. This is my useless box with a little bit extra...Moody lighting! Flick the switch for a lovely looking blue glow then watch in amazement as the box turns itself off and blasts out a harsh red light. Such a moody little box lol...... Anyway here is my instructable for the useless box moody lighting....

Step 1: Parts List

So not many parts are needed for this little mod which is good and the cost for it was about £1 in total haha. Here's what you need...... A Useless box. 1 Tri-colour LED. 3 Short pieces of wire (0.5mm x 100mm ish) A soldering iron. Solder and some wire cutters....

Step 2: Soldering It All Together....

Now you have your parts ready you can start putting it together. First you want to solder the wires onto the LED. One wire per LED leg. Then once that's sorted you can solder the other end to the toggle switch. This needs to be right or the thing won't light up how we want it to. So the middle LED wire is our earth (aka Ground, Negative, Neutral...) and the two either side are each of the colours. One for red and one for blue. So if you gave the left leg a voltage and earthed the middle it would light one colour, then if you swapped the voltage feed to the right leg it would light up the other colour. We want it to light one colour when opening the box and light the other colour when closing. To do this we need to solder the earth wire to the top right connector as shown in the picture. That's the important bit out of the way. Now for the other two wires. These go in the middle section of the toggle switch. These can go either way round so just decide which colour you want first and solder them in place. If you aren't happy with it then just switch them round.....easy!

Step 3: Testing

Now all the joints are in place just give the toggle switch a quick flick on and off a few times. This is just to check that the colour switches when you throw the toggle switch and that it turns itself off when the arm is in rest position...

Step 4: Sit Back and Enjoy...

So that's it. I left my LED loose inside the box for now just to see what it looked like. I may change where the LED is in the future so will add further updates as and when..  Thanks for looking and enjoy playing with your moody useless box. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh63GkCpewI

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