Samtid mood-light upgrade

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Materials: SAMTID

My 2nd attempt at building a reasonable mood-light using the IKEA Samtid lamp as the base. The previous attempts involved building a custom lamp shade, which didn’t look very polished at all.

This one is different. It doesn’t need any irreversible modifications to the lamp part (upper body + shade) at all, it is just added to it. It’s build around an ATmega168P micro-controller + 64 addressable RGB LEDs (WS2812B). It needs a 5V, 3A power supply.

Some optional mechanical modifications to the lamp’s lower body (struts) can be made to hide some of the wiring. I had previously made these additional holes, so I could simply reuse them for this project.

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Two additional holes / slots in the empty beam. One of them contains the AC mains wire, so I used the other one.

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One somewhat larger hole milled into the central column. There’s plenty of space.

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Additional wires bridging across the swivel joint.

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Getting the spring off and on again is a bit of a challenge. It is a really nasty bastard. Using a strong piece of string to pull it off turned out to be the easiest and safest way. Maybe wear gloves to protect your hands, should the string slip.

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The main circuit board fits snugly over the threaded lamp socket. As there are at least 2 slightly different versions of the Samtid lamp (this is the older one), a spacer board may or may not be necessary to keep the lamp-shade-holder from interfering with the LEDs. I used a bit of cardboard in this case, it’s about 1.5 to 2mm thick.

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Partially assembled lamp – testing the upgrade.

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The controller board is removable, there’s no need to rip the lamp apart for changing the firmware. The two buttons are used to switch between modes, adjust colour and brightness.

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Uploading code to the controller board using a cheap USB to serial adapter (FTDI compatible).

Code / design files are on github.


Finally a video. Enjoy!