The Elroy Lamp Features an Amazing Transparent LCD Shade

The odds are very good that you’re reading this article on an LCD display. Take a look at it, and you’ll notice that you can’t see through it no matter how hard you try. But that’s only because of the backlight, opaque backing, and the display’s enclosure. It is possible for an LCD to be transparent, like a window with pixels that magically appear on the surface. Kyle Scholz, of Kyle’s Make Blog, took advantage of that fact to build a very cool table lamp that features a transparent LCD lamp shade.

Even without any technological wizardry, Scholz's Elroy Lamp would look very nice. It has a rectangular wood frame that manages to mesh the aesthetics of the mid-century with modern minimalism. But, of course, it’s the LCD functionality that makes this lamp especially noteworthy. Each of the four vertical sides of the lamp shade is covered in a transparent LCD panel. Those can display any images — or even video — like any other LCD display. The light filters through those LCD panels and makes the patterns visible. With a simple swipe of a custom smartphone app, Scholz can instantly swap the pattern shown to completely change the style.

Those are all 13” LCD displays that were salvaged from old laptops. Scholz removed the backing layer, diffusion film, and backlight to make them transparent. The process is delicate, because the glass of the LCD is fragile. Scholz accidentally damaged two displays, and had to source additional units for this project. A large 35W LED light bulb is used for illumination, but diffusion is necessary to avoid a harsh glare. Scholz made the diffusers from a sandwich of frosted acrylic, vellum tracing paper, the LCD panel itself, rice paper, and anti-glare polycarbonate.

The LCDs are receiving video feeds from an NVIDIA Jetson Nano single-board computer (SBC). Scholz wrote a custom Pygame application to generate the art shown on the screens, and created web interface to control that from a smartphone or any other device on the same network. The frame and enclosure were constructed from a combination of walnut and 3D-printed parts. It’s not a cheap build, but the Elroy Lamp is definitely one of the most beautiful and unique lighting solutions that we’ve come across.