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Breadboard Prototype and Firmware

A project log for A Kid's Night Lamp

A night lamp for my little nieces, with lots of pretty colours and buttons to push

willWill 04/13/2014 at 11:211 Comment

I spent a bit of time over the weekend building a breadboard prototype of the design as well as writing the firmware. I've added the link to the firmware github repository over on the left hand side of the project page - MIT license.

The night lamp works like this:

There are a couple of issues with the firmware still to be sorted out, a signed char somewhere is causing havoc with high brightness values and the time periods for programmed light shows aren't being correctly parsed. I'll sort these out eventually.

In the meantime my wife has been looking into the housing for the lamp. We are considering sculpting something from Polymorph plastic at this stage because its easy to use, relatively cheap and has a nice diffuse effect.

I've ordered some parts and boards so will return to this project once parts start arriving.

Discussions

tomcircuit wrote 04/13/2014 at 21:12 point
This is a great project. I made a similar project for my two boys (now 8 and 16). I have re-done the electronics a couple of times, as the RGB LED got better and better (first version was back in 1999...things have improved since then).
Regarding the "shade", I used an edge-lit piece of laser-cut acrylic - cut in the shape of a cartoon character favorite of each boy. That works very well, and easy to do (find picture, trace using inkscape, submit to ponoko, receive and enjoy).
I'm looking forward to more updates on this project - thanks for sharing it!

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