Ledtable
This is a LED table I created in the first half of 2017. The table is based on an IKEA LACK table with 15x15 individually addressable full color RGB LED’s on it. A Raspberry Pi is mounted below that controls the LED array.
Materials and costs
| Component | Qty/measurement | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| IKEA LACK table | 1 | 5.00 |
| Raspberry Pi 2B (?) | 1 | 35.00 |
| WS2812b LEDs | 15x15 | 30.00 |
| 5V/3.3V buffer | 1 | 0.50 |
| 5V Power supply 18A | 1 | 26.77 |
| Acrylic 5mm | 560mm2 + sides | 50.00 |
| MDF 3mm dividers | 14+14 | 70.00 |
| Various parts | 30.00 | |
| Total | EUR 247.27 |
Steps
Drawing the lines
Begin by drawing a cross on the table, and recurse until the center of each cell is draw.
Adding LEDs
Cut the LED strip in pieces and paste them with hot glue on each center on the table. Connect the LEDs back together with three wires per piece (5V, GND and DI/DO). Pay attention to wire each DO (Data-Out) to a DI (Data-In) on the neighboring LED.
Dividers
The dividers where tricky. My first thought was cutting it by hand out of cardboard. But I’m not really precise, and doing it 28 times (14 horizontal and 14 diagonal) would have been difficult.
After some looking around for other options I found snijlab.nl Which is a great online service that will laser cut SVG files. It does come at a price, but the result is beautiful and very precise. A side-effect of the laser cutting are the burnt edges. This actually gives a really nice effect as the black enhances the edges.
Raspberry Pi and Power
Controlling the LEDs is a Raspberry Pi (model 2B, other models will also
do). The Pi’s GPIO pins operate at 3.3V, the WS2812b expects a 5V signal. To
bridge this gap a SN74HCT125N buffer is used to convert between 3.3V and 5V.
Power on!
It works \o/
Acrylic
Ordered, cut to the right size, at Dokter Plexiglas. Glued together with special Acrylic glue.
Finished!
Reflection
In hindsight it would have been much easier to not cut the led strips to individual leds and then solder them back together. Strips exists with varying distances between leds.
Also, the 15x15 size is bit of a strange dimension, 16x16 would have been nicer.