Modular LED Lamp Makes Your Whole Living Room a Lightshow

Ever wanted make your own LED light show? Thanks to the ingenuity and generosity of Maker Andreas Hölldorfer, you can! Using a 3D printer and some RGB LED modules, Hölldorfer built a modular light he calls the “StarLight.” In his video below, Hölldorfer gives a detailed description of all the components and how they go together.

The project started when Hölldorfer designed a latticed tower structure to stress test his new homebuilt 3D printer. He noticed the resulting structure scattered the light in a very pleasing way, and knew he had to do something more with them. So he designed a central “node” that the towers could snap onto and shine LEDs from.

The node has six sides, containing six NeoPixel-compatible RGB LED discs and one large 15 watt white LED on the bottom. The single node is controlled over Wi-Fi via one of the ever-so-popular ESP8266 boards, and the color can be selected using OpenHAB, an open source home automation software.

Of course, the next step was to scale it up, so Hölldorfer printed and assembled seven nodes and connected all of them with the towers. The large multi-node system uses a Particle Core board that is controlled over Wi-Fi by the PixelController software.

For those of you who are interested in making your own StarLight, Hölldorfer has provided the .stl file and demo sketch files on Thingiverse. Hölldorfer also has some other really cool projects on his website, so be sure to check those out too!