This Simple and Stylish WiFi Multi-Function LED Mood Lamp Is Easy to Build

You’re lucky if you have a great sense of style, but decorating your home can get very expensive. Furniture alone costs a lot of money, and that’s before you even get to art for the walls or other secondary décor items. One great way to add some flair to your home without spending a lot of money is to create your own wall art. If you want something a little more dynamic than a painting, you can follow thebigpotatoe’s tutorial to build a simple WiFi-controlled, multi-function LED mood lamp with a minimal amount of effort and money.

You only have to watch the short video below to get an understanding of how stylish and functional this LED mood lamp is. The basic functions show various soothing animated light patterns, but it can also display the time in an interesting—if not entirely practical—way. The minimalist wood design is quite attractive, and should fit into aesthetic of most modern homes. While you will need some basic technical knowledge to program the microcontroller and connect the wiring, it is simple enough that most hobbyists should be able to build this lamp with ease.

The LEDs for this project are popular WS2812b individually-addressable RGB LEDs, which are often referred to by the Adafruit NeoPixel brand name and come in strips. Those are controlled by an ESP8266 WiFi development board. ESP8266 development boards come in a variety of brands and styles, but just about any model should work. They can be programmed with the Arduino IDE using the provided code. It’s very important that you properly calculate the power requirements for the LEDs, as it will likely be very high and you’ll need to choose a suitable power supply. Once you have all of your parts, all you have to do is mount them to the back of a piece of lumber. The code will let you control the current lighting effect from your smartphone.