Watch This Mind-Bending Kinetic Sculpture in Action

Blinking an LED may not seem like a big deal, but it draws an engineer in like a moth to a porch light. The only thing they find better than blinking one LED is blinking two LEDs. And why stop there? The ideal number of blinking LEDs is always equivalent to however many you can find in your spare parts drawer.

YouTuber Nick Electronics apparently had 100 flexible LED filaments in his spare parts drawer that were just begging to do some blinking. To put them to good use, he decided to build a very unique lamp. It spins around and shifts its shape to put on a mesmerizing light show.

The kinetic sculpture is made from 25 stacked, ring-shaped PCBs, each carrying four flexible LED filaments. As the layers rotate, they interact mechanically to create flowing geometric patterns that ripple upward through the structure. The result looks more like a living, illuminated machine than a traditional lamp.

A custom-designed control board drives the lamp’s motion. A Microchip ATmega48 microcontroller handles the timing and motion logic, while a dedicated stepper motor driver controls the rotating mechanism. But the first power-up immediately revealed a major design flaw: the motor driver required at least 8 volts, while the USB supply only delivered 5 volts. So unsurprisingly, the motor refused to move.

Rather than redesign the entire circuit, Nick hacked it. He physically cut the PCB trace feeding the driver and inserted a DC-DC boost converter module to raise the voltage from 5V to 10V. With the extra voltage available, the stepper motor finally came alive.

Unfortunately, the motor’s native 18-degree full steps produced jerky movement that spoiled the illusion of fluid motion. To solve that problem, the project combined microstepping with a custom 3D-printed reduction gearbox. The gearing reduced the visible movement down to approximately 0.8 degrees at the outer ring, dramatically improving smoothness.

To get layered motion, each PCB ring contains a 45-degree angled slot and a small metal drive pin. As one layer rotates, its pin eventually catches the slot on the layer above it, dragging the next section along after a slight delay. This cascading interaction propagates upward through all 25 layers, producing the lamp’s signature wave-like transformations.

The toughest problem to solve was power delivery between the layers. Early attempts using spring-loaded sliding contacts created too much friction and caused intermittent electrical connections. A second experiment using wireless power coils ended even worse, with overheating components and smoking inductors.

The final solution involved using flexible wires routed directly through the structure. Because each layer only rotates about 45 degrees relative to its neighbor, the wires could safely tolerate the twisting motion. After machining a groove into the lamp’s brass support shaft to hide the wiring, the entire mechanism finally came together into a fully functioning kinetic light sculpture.