As a admirer of lava lamps,[ Julian Butler] knew when he saw a coworker’s modern LED incarnation of the classic piece of illuminated decoration that he had to have one for himself. The only trouble was that the Kickstarter for it had long since culminated, and they were no longer accessible. So he did what any good hacker would do: he studied it closely, made a knot of notes, and improved his own version that terminated up being even better than the original.

In the three character succession on his blog,[ Julian] makes us through the specific characteristics and building of his take on the Ion Mood Light, which raised over $72,000 back in 2014. The details in the Kickstarter campaign plus his own first-hand observations of the invention were enough to give him the high-level summary: the invention has a core of RGB LEDs behind a diffuser, and uses some application guile to pulse out some satisfy consequences and structures. He wasn’t concerned about the Bluetooth or the smartphone application, so all he really needed to do was place some NeoPixel LEDs inside a glass cylinder and he’d be done. Of direction, it ever clangs easy…

The actual excursion to get there, as you might have guessed from the three segment succession, took awhile. Sourcing the LEDs was easy enough, and using a Fadecandy controller realized get the LEDs to blink out some cool motifs fairly straightforward. But it made[ Julian] a bit of experimentation and a few expeditions to the spacecrafts store before “hes found” a material which would diffuse the LEDs enough for his experiences. Though in the end, he foresees the various mantles of acrylic he aimed up going with actually do a better job of blending the light-footed from the individual LEDs than in the original Ion.

Using the Fadecandy uttered it easy to drive the LEDs, but he still needed something to provide it with the words. To that result, he supplemented a decorative base to his LED column that hides a Raspberry Pi and all the lamp’s affiliated electronics. This includes a microphone which gives his lamp the same kind of racket reactive boasts that impelled the Ion so popular. The basi does realize his lamp a bit bulkier than the original form, but the metallic mesh interpretation is beautiful fairly the overall examine works.

Of course, you might be wondering how[ Julian] got the LEDs to react to sound, or do any of the other magnificent gists demo off in the video after the infringe. The application which utters this possible makes up the third and final berth in the succession, and is actually a whole job in itself. The short-lived form of the story is that he exercised Python and Processing to do real-time computational liquor dynamics, but not before acquiring the necessary adjustments to speed up the simulation on ARM hardware. You know , normal lamp stuff.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen programmes exerting the Fadecandy board. From creating a Tron induced table to building the 5,760 LED” Space Tunnel “, it looks like a great option if you’ve got a problem that can be solved by the application of a stupid number of LEDS.

Read more: hackaday.com