Full disclosure, I didn't invent this, but after seeing an awesome lamp in the background of a YouTube podcast/interview, I just had to get one.
The podcast appeared on my YouTube home screen of recommendations, from a channel called Dave's Garage, he's a retired software engineer from Microsoft who used to work on MS-DOS and various versions of Windows - a great channel if you're a programmer or general geek.
So I knew I just had to get the lamp, but after hours of Googling, I simply couldn't find it anywhere.
Days passed, days turned into weeks, then by chance I watched more of Dave's videos regarding programming an Arduino, something I've been planning to mess about with for years.
One of his videos was how he built the lamp, so I guess the guy being interviewed in the video decided to also build one himself, or Dave gave him it as a gift.
The video showing the assembly of the hardware can be found here, but episode 2 never seemed to be made, so I was left with an assembled lamp (hacked from another light fitting as you'll soon see), but no way to actually control the LEDs.
This is where I really got into programming the Arduino, or rather, the micro-controller that comes on an Arduino board.
This website and blog is the result of that journey.
From what I can tell, Dave has built up an extensive library of code for powering LED strip effects for umbrella's, windows, and the lamp, but I went a simpler route to get the fire effect, and just worried about the lamp - I like to keep things simple.
All instructions and parts are listed on this site, and all the code is freely available.
