TUTORIAL
Rustic lamp with colour-sensing lights
Glue dried moss
from twigs onto
the log for extra
texture, or to hide
the sensor’s circuit
board. Make sure
the tiny sensor and
on-board LED are
left uncovered.QUICK TIP
Position the mushrooms on the log and poke
the wires through the drilled holes. Remelt the
mushrooms slightly with a hair-dryer to mould them
to the contours of the log. That may be enough to
stick them to the bark. If not, use a hot glue gun.CREATE THE CIRCUIT
Perfboard has predrilled holes and copper pads on
one side, which make it easy to arrange components
and attach solder. For this tutorial, we will refer to
the side with the copper pads as the top.With the top of the perfboard facing down, poke
the three resistors into any holes. Turn the board
over, solder them into place, and cut the legs off with
wire clippers. All the green wires share the 330 Ω
resistor, so push the ends of the wires through the
perfboard close to the resistor and solder from the
underside. All the red wires go to one of the 220 Ω
resistors, and the blue wires go to the other 220 Ω
resistor. Use solder to create a bridge from each of
the wires to the relevant resistor.Solder the orange wires attached to the LEDs
to an unused area of the perfboard and join them
together using solder. This will become a shared
power connection. Red wires are often used for
power, but that colour has been used, so orange has
been chosen to avoid confusion.
From the underside of the perfboard, poke the
remaining green wire next to the 330 Ω resistor and
secure in place with solder, making sure the solder
touches the resistor too. Do the same with a red and
blue wire for the other resistors. These wires will
attach to the Arduino later.ADDING MAGIC TO THE MUSHROOMS
Although there are seven pins on the colour sensor,
you only need to attach wires to four of them. Solder
one end of the remaining orange strip of wire to Vin
(voltage in) for power and do the same with black to
GND (ground). Connect the blue wire to SDA (serial
data) and the green to SCL (serial clock), both of
which will communicate with the Arduino.
Connect the other end of the orange Vin wire to
the shared power area on the perfboard, created in a
previous step. The rest of the wires from the colour
sensor will go straight to the Arduino board.
Connect the black GND wire from the colour
sensor to one of the GND pins on the power section
of the Uno. Also connect the blue SDA wire to
Analog pin 4 and the green SCL wire to Analog pin 5.Top
Polymorph looks a
bit like frogspawn the
first tiTe `ou TeSt it
Above
When Polymorph is
heated, it becomes
malleable like clayMany clones of Arduino Uno boards (available on
eBay) have a line of holes as well as pins, which
makes it easy to solder wires to”
”
RedGreenBlue
Anode (positive)100 Ω 220 Ω 100 ΩLegs on the RGB LED**the order may be di erent
for your LEDs.PowerGroundAbove
This wiring diagram shows
how the components
connect together to create
the circuit220Ω330Ω220Ω