CD Lamp with LEDs

Versión del blog en Español aquí

Throughout my life, I've been accumulating an important quantity of CDs and DVDs. Nowadays, with hard drives and pen drives all over the place, I barely use the round plastic things anymore. That's way I decided to get rid of all of them that I could find. It turns out I had a bunch and felt like a waste of money just to throw them away, so I decided to make a last useful thing with them. A LED-CD Lamp.

I'm not the first one to come up with this idea. I had seen many lamps over the internet, but I didn't want to get influenced for other people's designs, so I just started mine from scratch. (Any resemblance [except for the CDs, obviously] with other lamps is pure coincidence).

Again, my mistake is to get too excited with the project I'm working on, and I forget to make an exhaustive documentation of all the steps I took, but I'll do my best to explain things clearly with the few pictures I took.

I removed the old curtains of my apartment, and with them, the rods where they were hanging. Again, instead of just throwing them away, I decided to make something new with them, so I cut them in pieces of 50cm to give rigidity to the lamp structure.

Taking the dimensions of the rod into consideration, I designed the bottom and the top for my lamp.

Bottom part of the lamp

Top part of the lamp

The rod parts will go in the small holes surrounding the big hole for the CDs.

I did buy the RGB LED stripe, and cut two pieces of 50cm (the height of the lamp).

I say I cut two pieces because the whole stripe has a limitation in the angle it can bend without compromising the components, and I needed a 180º fold at the top of the lamp to be able to stick the two pieces of the stripe "back to back". I then soldered a small wire in every connection of one end of every stripe.

And now only was left to solder the cables of the same connection with each other. The +12V of one stripe with the +12V of the other stripe, blue with blue, red with red, and green with green. In the picture from above, I soldered a colored wire corresponding to the color of the connection, so it was just a matter of soldering the same colors together.

And finally, the set up was pretty easy:

1. Place the bottom printed part on the table.
2. Insert the rod pieces in the holes surrounding the CDs.
3. Put the CDs in the center of the bottom part.
4. Fit the two stripes through the CDs.
5. Close the structure with the top printed part.

And this is the result:

And a short video: