I intend to make myself a bedside lamp – so here’s the plan. I’ll hollow out some lightbulbs, stuff them full of quartz crystal points, inelegantly shove some LEDs into drilled holes in the quartz, and attach it all using some painted gubbins onto a hollow wooden box with an arduino brain inside. I’m still trying to hammer out the details. My influences, and inspiration include the following:
- Team Droid’s Light Bulb Hollowing Tutorial (the original and best, as they say).
- I Make Project’s Glowing Crystal Lamp writeup/tutorial.
- The Hellboy props style of mixing magic and very practical, down to earth, technology (Holy Water bullets).
- The impressive work of the Afterglow Studio series of lamps.
I have the quartz points (ebay), I have two rather funky faceted light-bulbs from my local Home Depot (they look a little like diamond shaped bulbs), I’ve got the wooden box, a collection of strange copper fittings from the plumbing aisle, a rotary tool with brand new diamond coated bits (quartz is a 7 on the Moh hardness scale – very hard indeed! I melted a steel bit on it.) Ready to sit at the heart of it all, is a Arduino Uno experimenters kit from Sparkfun electronics. Until I finish this, I have no bedside lamp – so wish me and my eyes luck!
