Information page for the lights available in the funkboxing Etsy shop.
STYLES
BLOOM – Looks kind of like a weird underwater flower with fluorescent stems.
FLAME – A bubbly flame sort of thing, usually orange-reddish.
CLOUD – Like if you could drill a core sample from a cloud or something, but more colorful.
GUMBO – Whatever looks cool in a tube but isn’t one of the other styles.
SPACE – Scenes of whatever looks cool in a larger tube made from a fresnel lens sheet.
PARTS\MATERIALS
MicroUSB ATTINY85 Board, WS2812B LEDs (RGB and UV), WS2811 PCB with Discrete LEDS, Vinyl tubing, Silicone, Fluorescent\Glow-in-the-dark pigments.
DISCLAIMERS
~There’s a 10 second delay after you plug them in before the lights turn on. This is due to to the controller board being programmable and just is what it is because I want people to be able to reprogram them if they want. See ‘Hackability’ if you’re interested.
~These lights are not perfectly manufactured. They’re built entirely by one guy with a poorly calibrated 3d printer in the kitchen of a one bedroom apartment, but they should do what they’re made to do, which is light up and look kind of pretty.
~Don’t handle them too aggressively. They’re sturdy enough to survive light knocks, but they’re just display lights. The tubes are not completely rigid so you can squish them hard enough to destroy the scene if you try, but don’t try you should be fine. For best results just plug and stare.
~I guess they could catch fire, but most things could. These run at 5V and pull less than 50ma but they are made of electricity and rubber and that combination has some flammable potential so I feel I should mention it.
~Don’t consume them or let children or pets consume them. They’re probably toxic at some level and it just can’t be good for you. They look way better than they taste. Also these have zero considerations for children or pets so just keep them away entirely.
~I’ve hidden a false but very convincing secret of the universe in every 42nd light. The message is encoded in the LED’s PWM so it’ll become embedded in your subconscious the instant you turn on the light. Try not to fall for my cosmic lies.
PROCESS
At some point I’ll put more effort into documenting the process of working with silicone because it is pretty interesting and I haven’t found references to anyone else doing this kind of thing with it. I got some inspiration from people who work with clear resins, but silicone has a lot of different properties. My initial choice of silicone was by circumstance, it’s just cheap and available, but by now I appreciate some properties that make it a very unique substrate. I also found some information from people who had experimented with silicone to create homemade casting molds that turned out to be pretty useful.
This all started with the desire to make a kind of ‘warp coil‘ light. I found clear silicone worked well as a tube filler to make little ‘wave guide diffusers‘. Then at some point I had the notion to inject highlighter fluid into it for the fluorescent effect. A few dozen bizarre notions and experiments later I’d figured out several materials and techniques that looked cool enough to put in little lights.
The electronics were pretty simple since I’ve been working with Arduinos and LEDs for about a decade, though I did have to do some thinking and tinkering. I’ve been going back to the Arduino Nano for years. It’s my default for any non-wifi project, but I wanted USBMicro and the Nano is actually way overpowered just to drive 2-10 LEDs. I found the old digispark ATTINY85 board I got from their kickstarter (the USB-A version) and got it to run the FX loop after shaving off some superfluous code to get to 6000 bytes or whatver. So I ordered a bunch of the USBMicro version and those seem to work pretty well. Full disclosure I’m using the chinese knockoffs because they’re ridiculously cheap.
The BLOOM and SPACE lights have RGB LEDs at the top and UV at the bottom. The top of BLOOM is a 2×2 RGB matrix and SPACE is an 8 RGB ring. The bottom of BLOOM has a UV WS2812B pixel, and SPACE has a WS2811 PCB with 3 discrete UV LEDs arranged in a triangle for a kind of spotlight effect.
Designing the base\stand was painfully iterative. I’m a very lazy and imprecise 3d designer and really bad at maintaining\calibrating my 3d printer. But eventually I landed on a pretty simple but functional and aesthetically inoffensive design and that’s what I’ve been sticking with. I plan to adjust the base to make room for ESP based microcontrollers to implement WiFi, but overall I like the footprint and size of these so I’m going to try to keep this general look for a while.
MAINTENANCE\REPAIR
These shouldn’t require any maintenance, they just sit there and make light. Maybe dust it off every now and again. The tubes and stand are vinyl or plastic so avoid solvents or anything sharp or abrasive. As far as I know if left alone these tubes should outlast me, but I can’t test that assumption. If anything happens with the electronics but you want to keep the tube I can fix it, but any damage to the tube is irreparable. I’ll offer electronics repair for undamaged lights for one year after purchase for no charge except international shipping, and we can work something out after that or if they’ve been damaged.
HACKABILITY
These are made with common, inexpensive parts and open-source code so if you’re handy you can modify them to do whatever you want. New FX can be uploaded via USB without any modification, though getting the micronucleous programmer USB drivers set up on your PC can be a hassle especially on Ubuntu. I may post some links to tutorials at some point but this is hackablity for already hacky people, it’s not an educational device. The data pin will probably be 2, but you’ll want to open the case and double check. The LEDs are just WS2812B so you can swap out the board for something with WiFi or BT if you want. I’m all about hackery so if you intend to or end up doing something with these that they weren’t designed for please share, or if you need some help I’ll see what I can do. At some point I plan to make a 4×4 matrix of the FLAMES that can be controlled via WiFi so if that kind of thing is your bag let’s jam.
LED LOOPS
The FX loops use the FastLED library. There are no user adjustable settings via buttons or serial interface at this time, you just plug them in and they do what they do. The FLAME\CLOUD\GUMBO effects cycle through the color wheel. The bottom LED cycles +\-50 hue offset. Each LED has an independent brightness that cycles randomly from about 40-100%. Both LEDs cycle saturation between 50-100%. The top LEDs of BLOOM and SPACE crossfade between adjacent LEDs to give a bit of a motion effect to the scene. The bottom UV LEDs of BLOOM and SPACE crossfade between adjacent UV LEDs and randomly cycle the maximum brightness. These loops should create continuous but fairly random look that is interesting enough to stare at but doesn’t become distracting if you’re not looking at it.