Sea Urchin Night Light

Sea urchin night light that I built.  Sea urchins are echinoderms that live in the ocean. In life they are covered with spines for protection. After they die the spines fall out leaving a beautiful hollow shell. The familiar Sand Dollar is a form of a sea urhin.

There are five sea urchins in this lamp. The biggest two are English Channel urchins, the green urchin is conveniently named Green urchin, the smallest one is a Tuxedo urchin and the flat one is an Alfonso urchin.

The lights are RGB Leds. Each RGB LED has a red, green and a blue filament inside. Deciding how much power goes to each filament controls the hue of the color. The leds are controlled by an Arduino microcontroller that I programmed to power each filament.  There are five momentary buttons underneath the lamp that cycle through each color for each urchin.

The box is made from mahogany.  The mahogany if from an old house my brother once lived in.  While he was refinishing it he tore out the old painted trim to replace it with new and he discovered the old trim was made from mahogany! One of the previous owners painted mahogany trim!  At the base of the lamp I gilded two 23k channels.

I have since learned how to control the Arduino microcontrollers to accept commands via bluetooth. My plan is to add a bluetooth module so the lamp can be controlled with my smartphone. I will aslo add a color fading function so each urchin can slowly faded between colors.