DIY a Retro Wooden Lamp With BBG

You can built so many beautiful things with wooden and laser cutter. And it will much more better if add some electric modules, we call it the combination of electronic and art.

Here I will share my latest creation, a wooden lamp that the color controlled by a 3-Axis Accelerator. It’s a very funny way to change the color of the lamp. Different location of the lamp will create different colors.

Thanks to the open hardware, you can make it even if you are a newbie to electrical. Just a few steps, and you can make it out. Now let go for make.

Prepare the Stuff

The stuff is in 3 parts, electronic modules and the wooden as well as the others.

Electronic modules:

Actually all the above-mentioned module was in

Grove Starter Kit for BeagleBone Green

Wooden and laser cutter:

4mm wooden board (400x400 mm size)
3mm frosted acrylic (50x50 mm size)
5V mobile power supply

Others:

3M double-side tap
M2 screw and nut (about 10mm is enough)
No.502 glue or AB glue

You can find a laser cutter and 3D printer easily if there’s a maker space near from you. I can say that every maker space has a laser cutter and 3D printer. If you can’t find the wooden board of a laser cutter, you can try the laser cutting service and 3D printing service supply by Seeed.

Cut the Wooden Board

ou need to find a 4mm wooden board first, the size should be larger than 400x400mm.

You can download the file here.

Cut the Acrylic and Embed Into the Wooden Board

Here we will cut some frosted acrylic and embed into the wooden.

Click here to download the 2D acrylic file.

Install the Electronic Modules on the Board

We need some 3M double-side tap, or glue gun is ok if you can’t find the 3M double-side tap.

3D Print a Lamp Shade and Install the RGB LED

Here we will print a lamp shade and laser cut some holder, thus we can install the rgb led on the wooden board.

Click here to download the 3D file for the shade

Click here to download the 2D file for the acrylic holder

And you need some No.502glue or AB glue here.

Hardware Connect

You will find 2 Grove connect on the BBG. What

you need to do is just connect the BBG to the Grove with some cable:

BBG I2C Port > I2C Hub
I2C Hub > Grove – 3Axis Accelerator
I2C Hub > Grove – I2C ADC > Grove – Button
BBG UART Port > Grove – Chainable RGB LED

Software Installation

First, you should set the Grove UART socket as a GPIO port, if you don’t know how to do it, just follow this link.

You can download the example code by click here.

$ git clone https://github.com/Lee-Kevin/3.Wooden_Lamp_BBG/

Copy the “3.Wooden_Lamp_BBG” folder to “/var/lib/cloud9”.

$ cp 3.Wooden_Lamp_BBG /var/lib/cloud9

Run the code

$ python colorbox.py

Final Assembly

Finally we got to the last step. After this step we will get a lovely wooden lamp.

Refer to the image below to view the details for assembly.

The last but not the lease, you may ask: You use a BBG to control a LED, it’s just a waste.

Well, never mind about it, just because I got a BBG by hand. And you can change BBG to an Arduino easily.