Wooden Reactor Simulator Is a Glamorous Lamp, Wireless Charger, and More
This “lamp” built by Kostiantyn Andriiuk is as extra as they come.
Kostiantyn Andriiuk clearly loves his RGB LEDs, AKA "gamer lights," because he built this crazy colorful lamp thing called the Wooden Reactor Simulator.
I refer to this as a “thing,” because it is really hard to fit into a single distinct category. It is a lamp with very elaborate RGB LED effects, but also additional features like wireless charging, USB fast charging, and synchronized sound effects. In my opinion, it fills a niche similar to a classic lava lamp: one part practical device and nine parts entertainment machine.
As with his gesture-controlled DNA lamp that we featured a couple of months ago, Andriiuk put a lot of obvious effort into the woodworking for this project. It uses copious amounts of oak, alder, and walnut veneer, with plenty of glass and copper to drive home the steampunk aesthetic. But unlike most steampunk builds, this puts a much greater emphasis on colorful light.
Andriiuk doesn’t say how many LEDs are in this thing, but it is clearly a large number. Those are a combination of WS2812b individually addressable RGB LEDs and LED filaments in a variety of sizes and colors. There is also optical fiber to direct that light when needed. The LEDs operate under the control of a ESP32 development board, with several PWM (Pulse-Width Modulation) LED drivers to lighten the load. The primary power supply is a very beefy 12V 10A unit, which feeds DC-DC converters and step-down units (for fast charging).
In additional to the lighting hardware, Andriiuk also included a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini MP3 player and speaker for sound effects and a 15W wireless charging module. That module is on top, so it looks like you’re charging your phone with some kind of nuclear reactor — hence the name.
There is a nightlight mode, desk lamp mode, particles mode, and a custom effects mode, each of which has its own set of animations, sound effects, and lighting styles. Users can control those on their smartphone using a web interface hosted by the lamp, or with physical sliders and switches on the lamp.