IKEA weekend light fixture hack

In my sons nursery, we have the changing table against the wall. The problem is the only light in the room is in the middle of the room from a ceiling fan. So basically while your changing him you are blocking the light with your body.

So me and the wife went looking for a light to add to his changing table, we found one at IKEA that we like but it’s a ceiling mount light with 3 individual 35 watt flood bulbs, with cartoonish fish as the housings. I’m not about to drill a hole in the ceiling and install a wall switch (as the instructions state it’s supposed to be installed), so we looked around for something else but nothing caught our eye.

I decided to just get this fixture, and hack it.

In the lighting section of IKEA they have some DIY lamp kit, I just needed a cord since I’m going to be plugging this in the wall, and they’re pretty cheap. So I grabbed the neon green one since it looks cool.

First thing I did was open everything up to see what we are dealing with…

LED Fireflies in a Jar (v1.0)

Me and my wife recently had our first child. I’ve been trying to come up with some projects I can do for the kid. Well, around this time of the year the fireflies go crazy around my house, so we came up with the idea to do led fireflies in a jar. It should be something cool for him to stare at and is easy to build.

Schematics, C source code and hex file are available here on our wiki. If you want to build one it should only take about an hour.

I’m planning on making a version 2 with some changes, stay tuned for that one.

Using the PICkit 2 : As a Programmer

Around the space, we have been using the PICkit 2 Debug Express quite a bit lately. This has allowed us to get pretty cozy with the functions of this handy little programmer and I thought I would share some of these features with you.

I’m sure you’ve read the previous tutorial ‘Programming PIC Microcontrollers in C‘, if you haven’t, you should go familiarize yourself with it now. Continuing on from there, after we have a successful build of a led blinking we can use the PICkit 2 to program our chip via the ICSP header.

Upcoming Events

It’s come to my attention that everyone may not be aware of the upcoming events. So I thought I’d post about them. They are however posted on the calendar to the right for future reference! We hope to see you at the these events!