Andy’s lovely mood lamp looks even better under the hood! To keep the pattern of light even, he devised a really sweet dodecahedral assembly of custom circuit boards with SMD LEDs mounted on them.
The first thing I did was devise a plane for the “bulb.” I decided to go with a dodecagon, which I believe means a 12-sided object. Actually, I had no idea what one of these things was called. I just figured that I needed pentagons to make something more globe-like than a cube. I wanted light to emanate outward from this bulb thing like a light bulb, but with as few sides as possible. The sides were no doubt going to be PCBs, so the less complex, the better. Not that this wasn’t one of the most complex circuit boards I’ve ever built in my short time as a hobbyist circuit builder.
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A potentiometer controls the dimming of the LEDs. The other knob on the breadboard is a rotary encoder. This allows the user to change the mode of the lamp from a plain white for reading to an auto-cycling rainbow of colors to a user-selectable color. The built-in pushbutton changes the mode. The rotary encoder’s knob changes the speed of the auto-cycling colors or the user-selected color.
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