I got asked by a friend one day to help refurb a set of 4 bubble lamps which only glowed white so i happily accepted and this is how we went about it. I wish i had taken more picture at the time but this is all i have below but i will try and describe what we did to pimp these lights.
First problem i seen was that the power system was really bad because the bubble lamps where basically shop bought 240VAC lamps bodged into a limo, somone in all their original genius thought they would use a 150W inverter to boost the 12VDC car battery up to 240VAC and then plugged in the wall adapter which dropped it back 12VAC for the aquarium pump and lamp. so in an attempt to increase safety and efficiency i made a quick 555 IC circuit tuned to around 50hz which worked like a charm pumping the bubbles. The RGB LEDs where controlled by an atmega8 that just run a couple of loops and had some beefy Mosfets connected to allow them to control a lot of lights at any one time but less talk more pictures.
- A quick pic of the bubble lamp in a sorry state before we set to work on it
- The eagle CAD drawing of the top and bottom circuit for the RGB Lights
- Top View of PCB with 6 x 78XX voltage regulator circuits and 4 x RGB light controllers attached
- Side View of PCB which was made using positive photo resist and UV lamp
- Top View of finished PCB which was cut out using a bench scroll saw
- Side View of finished PCB
- Lamp first test of lights without water
- All 11 lights at full power showing white