As if 720 RGB and 720 warmwhite LEDs* wasn’t enough for a living room… [* 2*12m Led strips on the walls] – I added a light-up table!
Back in 2007 the first of my friends moved out from their parents home and got her own appartment. We celebrated – and I gave her a color-changing lounge-table like the ones our favourite bar had. It was a simple, wooden 50*50 frame with 4 legs, an acrylic-glass top and a color-changing LED-lightbulb.
Years later, in 2017, I bought my first sofa creating the need for a coffee table. As a tribute to the ‘Schollenspiel’ we created the year before, I decided to go for a hexagonal table with LED-strips, similar to the 60 LED-‘ice-floes’. [article and pictures of the game will be added in the near future]
Here’s what the building process looks like:
The frame is composed of white cupboard-shelfes and outfitted with 3 legs and wheels. An extension cord enters through the bottom to connect the power supply. The LEDs are arranged on a wooden hexagon, soldered together and placed on top of the receiver and power supply. To avoid the visibility of individual LEDs, the acrylic glass is coverd with sticky foil and then placed on top of the wooden rests on each side. A plastic corner-cover keeps the ‘glass’ in place and ensures spilled coffee/beer won’t get to the electronics.
As you can see, the LED-strips I still had lying around had 2 different tones of blue – and the wifi-controller in the pictures isn’t Alexa compatible. I since replaced these LED strips to have a unified colorspace and put in a controller similar to the one powering my wall-LEDs.
The LEDs can be controlled via smartphone or voice-control via Alexa.
The last picture shows a hexagonal wall-mounted frame with a Tequila-hat on display. It’s based on a hexagonal tray I found in a store and omitts the acrylic glass. The ‘picture’ is thin black plastic stuck to sticky foil and the LED strip runs around the inner edge of the tray. I’ve built a few of these simplified, wifi controllable versions so far =).
Shopping list:
– ~6m RGB-LED-Strip
– a wifi-led-controller (magic home compatible)
– a 12V 60W power supply
– extension cord with in-line switch
– a hexagonal inner-plate for LEDs
– a hexagonal bottom-plate of wood
– a hexagonal 6mm acrylic glass top
– plastic corner-cover + silicone
– white sticky foil as diffusor
– six side-covers, 100mm high
– inner wooden rests for glass
– 3 legs with attached wheels
– screws, glue, metal-angles, wire & solder
After building a nice teabag-shelf, I decided to build my own coffee-capsule-holder as well. More durable wood and more precise planning & cuts this time, same ‘teak-wood’-paint.
Shopping list:
– a backplate of wood
– some thin wooden bars (vertical dividers); height ~ capsule-height + 2mm
– some flat wooden pieces to prevent the capsules falling out the front
– some smoothened ‘stoppers’ to ensure the capsules have to be pulled/squeezed a little to come out at the bottom.
Annoyed of getting teaboxes out of the shelf and opening them to finally be able to get a teabag? So was I – and built a solution: Most boxes can be used as teabag-spenders when put vertically but they require some kind of retractor to be able to pull one out. Other Teabags come in individual paper-wraps. Here’s my ‘cheap, quick & dirty’ teabag-shelf. [Yes, lasercut/cnc-milled or thicker wooden pieces would look more awesome but it serves it purpose – ( maybe I shouldn’t have covered it in ‘teak-wood’-paint though… :D) ]