WLED Neopixel Cloud Lamp

thingiverse

I made this Neopixel cloud lamp as a mashup of two existing designs in OpenSCAD. I used the ring as a base where I placed an ESP8266 WLED controller, and the cloud as the top. I filled the lamp with a string of fifty(50) WS2812b fairy lights from BTF Lighting. I hot glued 37 LEDs directly to the exterior to provide "spotlights", and the other 13 I left as a "loose tangle" in the interior. Effects are provided by the totally excellent WLED software (running on an ESP8266 NodeMCU controller, which I installed in the base). I configured WLED so that the 37 LEDs are one segment, and the 13 interior LEDs are a second, separate segment. This lets the user (note me, this was a gift) control the interior and exterior lighting separately, with completely separate effects. Turning off the exterior lights and setting the interior lights to the "Lightning" effect produces an amazing simulation of real lightning (in whatever color the user desires :-). My thanks to the original designers for making the build straightforwards; other than some minor adjustments in OpenSCAD, all I had to do was print and vapor finish the mashed up design. A note on power: I used a 4A 5VDC (wall wart) power supply, with WLED ampacity power limiting set to 3000 mA. This allows near full brightness for all 50 smart LEDs while still providing a capacity margin on the power supply. With these settings, I did not need to provide ventilation for the lamp; it grows warm on full white with extended use, but not dangerously hot. [For large quantities of LEDs, such as 700+ in some of my other lamp designs, I've employed convection cooling coupled with WLED current limiting with good results.]