Add Flair to Your Dull, Unlit Walls with These Hexagonal LED Lights

We all want our homes to look nice, inviting, and to act as proof of our superior interior design tastes, which is why products like Nanoleaf’s Light Panels exist. Those nifty modular panels are triangular so that they can tessellate, allowing you to snap together many panels and create your own unique designs. They’re lit by RGB LEDs that can be controlled by your smartphone, or even synced to your music. Unfortunately, they’re quite expensive. But don’t fret! You can follow moderncrafts’ tutorial to build your own LED panels that are very similar.

While these aren’t exactly the same as Nanoleaf Light Panels, they are much more affordable. Instead of triangular panels, they’re hexagonal—and arguably tessellate in a more pleasing way. There also isn’t any provision for making the LEDs music-reactive. Finally, mounting these takes a little bit more forethought than the Nanoleaf Light Panels. Instead of panels that snap together, these need to be more permanently attached to one another. That means you’ll need to decide on the design shape you want from the beginning. But those are small sacrifices to make considering how much money you can save, which will easily be well over a hundred dollars.

Each hexagonal panel is 3D-printed and covered in a sheet of 2mm translucent acrylic to diffuse the WS2812b individually-addressable RGB LEDs. Those LEDs are controlled by a single WeMos D1 mini ESP8266 board. That can drive a virtually unlimited number of panels, so long as you take care to provide enough power and distribute it properly. The provided ESP8266 code will allow the board to host its own webserver, which you can access from your smartphone to change the colors of the panels. That even includes a handful of animated lighting effects. If you’ve been drooling over Nanoleaf’s Light Panels but haven’t wanted to dish out that kind of cash, this is a fantastic DIY alternative.