LED Coffee Table

Former Member

4 Sep 2013

Hey everyone!

I build a coffee table with RGB LEDs, as you can see in the following youtube video:

For this project I first bought a cheap IKEA table for 5€ and cut a square hole in it.

In this hole I glued walls out of white styrofoam with this 5 x 5 squares as you can see in this picture:

The LEDs are 25 12mm diffused RGB LEDs with a 5V WS2801 Drivers for the SPI interface of the raspberry pi.

I put the pi in one of the walls of the table and closed the table with a mat transparent plexiglass.

The last thing I have done was assembling two arcade buttons on the sides of the table to control different games with them.

The programming is done in python. You can find the code on github: https://github.com/stetro/pix-table

I hope you like it, and if you have any question, you can always ask me ;-)

There is also a german blogpost about this project: http://stetro.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/led-coffee-table-raspberry-pi/

Top Comments

dkelley810 over 10 years ago +1

Great Project. I am going to connect my Pi to a LED Light strip that is installed in my Bedroom. My wife and I bought the house the the strip already installed, so I want to be able to manually change…

Anonymous-532400 over 7 years ago

That's a really cool project!
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rajneeshkatal over 7 years ago

Hi Steffen - i need you help, in re-programng my TV soundbar. the problem i am facing is everytime i switch off the TV , soundbar setting wents to default i.e. zero volume and i have to select AUX function from remote as it is connected with TV via AUX. can you help me in guiding to hold the last volume and automatically sets it to AUX mode?
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dkelley810 over 10 years ago

Great Project. I am going to connect my Pi to a LED Light strip that is installed in my Bedroom. My wife and I bought the house the the strip already installed, so I want to be able to manually change the colors. What better way to connect a Pi to. Great idea with your table!
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Former Member over 12 years ago in reply to Former Member

Hey, this project isn't that big outlay :-) First of all you need this 25 LED Stript with WS2801 controllers. I bought them on ebay for 19€ ;-) In this strip of LEDs there is a 5-6 cm long wire for the SPI connection, you simly have to wire the beginning of the strip to the Pi's SPI interface. I also used a single power source as u can see in this wiring diagram.

After i have done the connection, I started to try some programming, like simple light slides with python and the SPI interface. You can use it as a file when you have done the SPI setup.
spidev = file("/dev/spidev0.0", "wb")
You can also use something like this http://www.100randomtasks.com/simple-spi-on-raspberry-pi

Otherwise, take a look at my github project for this table :-)

My setup looks like this:

To setup two buttons on the side, I use two of the GPIO ports with a 10k pullup resistor!
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Former Member over 12 years ago

wow , it looks great , please provide some more details i want it any how in my new dream home at <a href="http://www.austin-apartments.txapartmentlocators.com/">austin tx apartment locator</a> please its my humble request..
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