Discolight
Ikea Blimp Light
Ikea once sold (now more difficult to get hold of than unicorn tears) a kids bedroom light called the Blimp (who doesn't love Ikdea's naming strategy?). My boy had one in his room and when it worked it looked like this:
Anyway, I've found in the past that Ikea love their lights, but sometimes they don't seem to care quite so much about the power supplies they give with them. This was indeed the case when it started flickering... Turned out the wire was a bit tired from holding the weight of the light for so long. I tried a couple of times to give it life again in one form or another, but when it kept flickering even after switching out cable and power supply, I finally gave up as if I get to choose where to cause a fire, my son's bedroom is not high on that list.
So, what to do then? Well, it just has to come apart properly, see what we can do with it!
I take it apart properly this time, noting that in the centre of the sphere is a halogen bulb that casts very strong light out to some internal cones, into which at the bulb end the stars, moons and planets have a cut out. At the end of the cone is a coloured plastic lens.
So, super bright Leds then, we could mount Leds into the cone ends inside the sphere and that will light up the lens, throwing the coloured shape on the wall... ...only by the time the cones come to a point there's not a huge amount of room in the centre of the sphere.
Flat Leds?
NEOPIXELS!
I have a 50x length of these! What if I mount one above each of the light cones inside the sphere!
...coloured lenses. Hmn. That would restrict the colours that could be thrown out. What if I made new clear lenses?!
So, I made a silicone mounld of one of the lenses, then cast clear lenses from that mould using pourable epoxy resin.
Next step was to model and print neopixel holders to fit onto the cones inside the sphere.
P I C T U R E
Then piece it all back together fitting in a ESP8266 with a IR Reciever circuit and boom! Massively upgraded Blimp!
light cones
These were the trickiest part of the whole concept. The orignal lenses were coloured, so needed to be replaced with clear lenses. To make clear lenses I needed to make silicone moulds of the original coloured lenses, then mould 21 new clear lenses using epoxy resin
After I had mounted some of them in the cones and re-mounted those cones back into the main surrounds I tested the intensity of the LED light, only to find that a great deal of the light lux was lost bouncing around the light cones, so I experimented with foiling the inside of a cone. The result was substantially stronger, meaning I needed to create flat cone templates to cut out of silver sticky backed paper: silver_foil_insert.pdf