Crafty Crumble Creations: A colour changing lamp

By Helen Roberts on December 11, 2014 in Crumble Projects

This is the first in a series of posts, incorporating the Crumble Controller into simple craft projects, “helped” by my just-turned 5-year-old. The electronics aspect was a bit beyond him: he doesn’t yet have the motor skills to clip the croc-clips or to drag-and-drop the software blocks with a trackpad. He enjoyed working on the design of the lamp, though, and the whole project was completed quickly enough to hold his interest.

We used:

1 laptop with Crumble software installed
1 Crumble controller
1 Sparkle
1 micro-USB cable
1 battery box with croc-clip attachments; 3 AA batteries
3 croc-leads (red, black & green)
1 plastic shower gel bottle (washed & thoroughly dried)
1 cardboard box
1 sheet of black card; silver wrapping paper & stickers
Scissors, hole-punch & sellotape

The Crumble can be powered from the computer, via the USB cable, but the Sparkles need extra power. The red lead from the battery box was connected to the top-left pad of the Crumble (+) and the black lead to the pad below (-). Power passes through the Crumble to the pads on the top-right. The red and black croc-leads connect from the Crumble’s power-out + and – pads, respectively, to the top 2 pads on the left side of the Sparkle. The green croc-lead connects pad ‘D’ on the Crumble to the bottom-left pad on the Sparkle to send the data to the Sparkle. This is shown in the diagram, left.

The Crumble was connected to the computer, via the USB lead, and we began to experiment with setting the Sparkle colour.

The five-year-old was keen on red and green, but I managed to persuade him to go with a more muted colour palette of blue, violet and cyan. The next version of the Crumble software will include a “fade to..” command for Sparkle control which will allow a bigger range of colours to be used with smooth transitions.

The final program is shown to the right.

Once we had programmed the Crumble and were happy with the colours, we disconnected it from the USB lead and began to construct our lamp.

We found a box big enough to contain the battery box, crumble and sparkle and cut a whole in the top to stand the plastic bottle in. The sparkle was sellotaped inside the box so that it shines straight up into the bottle and the rest of the electronics were squashed in around it.

Meanwhile, the 5-year-old had found a hole punch and started making holes in a sheet of red paper. He turned this into a cylinder to cover the plastic bottle.

Aesthetically, I felt we could do a bit better. I wrapped the box in an off-cut of wrapping paper and replaced the red paper with black card. The 5-year-old had already worked out that it’s necessary to fold paper or card to make holes in the middle, so the cylinder became a cuboid. A few scattered silver dot stickers enhanced the random effect.

FINAL THOUGHTS: The lamp ended up looking better than I expected, given how quickly it was thrown together. The tangle of wires in the box, though, is not ideal: shorter croc-leads and a more secure way of fixing the Sparkle in place are required. A switch on the outside would also be useful so we could turn the lamp off and on without taking it apart.

Can you do any better? We’d love to hear about your Crumble projects!