Introduction to Night Lights

Hello and welcome to Night Lights 💖✨.

I build objects out of light. Addressable LED strips, 3D printed shells, a microcontroller tucked into the base, and a few hundred lines of code to make the whole thing breathe. I’ve been doing this for years, and almost everything I know came from forum posts and YouTube videos. Night Lights pays some of that debt back.

The first project I built for Night Lights is 01 – Temple, a lamp that fills your room with warm, slow light. Temple was designed to function as a introductory build. You’ll wire a strip of WS2812B LEDs, flash firmware to an Arduino microcontroller, write your first FastLED animation, and print the shell. No prior electronics experience needed. The kit ships with the shell already printed, so a soldering iron gets you to a finished lamp. Want to print your own? The files come with the guide.

Future projects grow from there. Multiple modes. Motion. Capacitive touch and various other sensors so the pieces react to the room around them.

Between project releases I’ll write about parts of this work. Some of what’s coming:

• How to print shells for light instead of for strength, and why the two goals fight each other
• Soldering to LED strip pads without lifting them off the flex PCB
• Why your 5V power supply browns out at full white, and the math to size a new one
• FastLED palettes, and how to make an animation look designed instead of random
• Choosing between an ESP32, an RP2040, and an ATtiny for a given piece
• Wire management inside a sealed enclosure

The blog stays free. Every post comes out as an article you read here, no purchase involved.

The guides are something else. Each one walks a single build start to finish with the CAD files, the wiring diagrams, the firmware, and the bill of materials. Find them here.

If you’d rather start with something in your hands, fully built lamps can be found here, and DIY Kits that come with both the Guide as well as printed pieces, controllers, wire, etc. are here.