Neopixel Talk to the Burning Bush Lamp

See the light.

Tired of wandering around trying to figure out what to make?

Not divine inspiration but do make this simple build of a Burning bush that lights up to the sounds around it.

Note: This is just a quick ible to show what can be hacked with parts I had laying around so don't expect a high quality instructable. Rate and subscribe.

I had this tiny desk fan where the top part with the blades and motor broke off its stand. The wires had ripped off whatever it was attached to so it I put it in the random parts bin knowing I will probably need a motor to experiment with sometime later on and I could scavenge the parts from the broken fan. I had to take the base apart and resolder the wires to the battery pack to get it up and running again.

I had my Neopixel LED strip/ring and Adafruit Flora wired up from my previous Neopixel Running Water Faucet Lamp. It's an arduino that controls the flashing of the lights. I soldered on an electret microphone sound sensor module to the setup. With that, I could make a sound reactive "color organ" which lights up the LED strips according to the loudness of the sound it picks up. The code is available in Adafruit's Ampli-Tie tutorial. I have adapted that for a lot of my other Neopixel projects, especially wearables.

To make the branches of the bush, I had a pack of brown/tan pipe cleaners.

To make the "flames", I had a bit of a thin silky fabric that flutters in the wind.

Additionally, a bit of cardboard or whatever material you want to make the fan shroud to better direct the airflow.

Those decorative "pots of fire" or simulated flame pots/firebowls work by fluttering a piece of fabric with a fan and shining some bright colored lights on them. The fabric in motion reflects the lights to give it that glow and illusion of dancing flames.

I used the pipe cleaners to make the branches of the bush. They were wound around the fan grille to anchor them in position. At the ends ot the wire, I wound in some strips of fabric. I had to play around with getting the strips to flutter in the airflow of the fan. The fan wasn't really that powerful enough to make the strips of fabric move so I kept on trimming them down to thinner strips.

I tried to make a fan shroud to direct more of the airflow of the fan. It helped a little but not much.

I then placed the Neopixel strips inside the fan circled on top of the grille. A Neopixel ring lit up in fiery orange red was placed on the bottom of the fan shining up.

So,

Get yourself a nice powerful little fan, hairdryer, a bank of fans, or duct in air from somewhere.

Try to focus the lights to reflect off of the fabric leaves.

And turn up the music, these electret mics aren't really that good with audio - even with gain adjusted - and I don't have a circuit that takes line level in to use with the arduino.

Make one yourself and scale up to any size needed.

Enjoy!