Hydroponic board

Well, sometimes you have to admit failure. I shelved the wheel, the soft micro greens I want to grow do not like the rotation much. So I went and bought the IKEA VÄXER system.


I didn't bought the light they sell though. I used their light fixture and just glued some blue and red leds under it. Much cheaper.


The plants moved over to the new system an are much happier now. The first harvest was quite tasty.

Triplet ceiling lamp

A lamp made out of three Hella fog lamps ('Hella 1NL 008 090-821' to be exact).

The lamps are mounted upside down and are adjusted to light the ceiling but not the wall. They are nearly parallel to the ground but still only light the upper part. So you can see the exit point of the light but it doesn't dazzle.

The 12V transformator is contained in an Ikea Blanda Blank metal bowl - perfect fit.

A learning: Do not use speaker cable for anything that gets hot! I had this mounted 3 month ago, but the isolation of the speaker cabling melted and shorted. Thankfully I was in the room and could switch it of before everything went to hell.

Downsides: Gets horribly hot, draws just under 300W, really expensive (around 150€ in parts)

Light bowls

The small central corridor of our flat is lit by an old IKEA cable track light with three spots. We got it with the flat and I kinda liked it, but as I stumbled upon shiny white bowls with inner golden coating its day were numbered.

Goodbye, boring lights.

I used the cable track and the original mounts to attach the bowl, which in turn got an 1157 car light socket installed. I wanted to install LED lights and therefore put an rectifier on top to convert the AC from the IKEA transformator to (100Hz pulsed) DC. I used rectifiers about 50x to big which enabled me to use the AC input wires as mounting points (~1mm thick) to hang the lamp from.

One LED is already dead...

The cheap 'warm' LED lights I bought produce a strange ghostly light. Not perfect. And the 100Hz kinda show, maybe I will put some caps on there.

But they look nice in the corridor, I will try to get other lamps to improve the light temperature.

35mm spiral lamp

I just finished a new lamp made out of a single long unbroken 35mm film strip.

After reading about something similar on Hackaday IkeaHackers, I went on eBay to get some old film. This (a trailer of Zathura for 5€) arrived this weekend and I got strait to work.

I used the transportation holes to sew the film strips to each other with fishing line. This was really slow work, took me over 6 hours to get it up to a height of 70 cm with an diameter of 22 cm.  I used an old Ikea Storm lamp that I had in the attic as the frame. The paper shade was torn apart and the first and the bottom two rings were reused as bottom and parts of the top.

The pictures were made with a 60W 'retro-style' lightbulb inside that produces quite dim and yellow light. The bulb has a long glow filament which produces these strange zigzag patterns on the wall. With a smaller, brighter light source or some well placed leds the pictures on the film could appear on the wall I think.

Its not really useable as a light source now. But thats ok, this thing is not meant to produce anything else then mood light after all.

I'm really happy with the result, I think it looks awesome!

I planned to make another, much bigger one but the sewing really takes ages. Maybe if I find a faster way to connect the strips I have a go again...

Oh and: Pictures are jpegs strait from the camera, no tampering with the colors, this is really what it looks. =)

Update: More pics!

Bathroom makeover

We have a very small bathroom (barely 4,5 square meters) and were sick of looking at the old plastic-and-glass thing that held our towels. So we went out to Ikea to get some ideas.

First we introduced a new carpet matching the tiling. Than we looked for a replacement for the ugly glass rack. The space is really tight and has the connectors for a washing machine in the middle, we needed some way around that.

More here:

http://www.ikeahackers.net/2011/03/bathroom-makeover.html