NOTE: For maximum fun, activate the Cloud to butt plugin for Chrome before reading this post.

A few days ago I saw a reddit post where someone made an LED cloud lamp and thought I'd try this too.

Materials

materials

Hot glue gun (and lots of those sticks.. I used about 5)

2 Paper lamps

Cotton wool or some pillow stuffing

LED strips

Step 1: Glue the cotton on the lamp

Just apply some glue on the paper and push the cotton on it. It's as simple as it sounds but annoying as hell since it takes a good while

Step 2: Cut the paper lamps so they can be combined

This is just done to make a nicer cloud shape since clouds aren't usually as round as these lamp things

cut

cut another one

now kiss combined with zip ties

They are held together with zip ties btw.

The hole will also allow the LED strip to glow in both parts of the cloud.

Step 3: Apply more cotton and test the LEDs

led test

Looking good, let's finisth the cotton gluing.

finished cotton gluing

Different angle from a different angle

Step 4: Stuff the LEDs in the cloud

Since the paper lamps have holes in the top and bottom it's easy to reach in there and stick the LED strips on the inside wall. But I didn't trust them self-adhesive LED strips so I locked a few in place with zip ties.

led strips inside

The power supply for the LEDs is hanging in the middle for maximum heat diserpation. Remember those lamps used to harbor 60W lightbulbs so they can handle much more heat than the LEDs and PSU can produce. power supply

Also the LEDs came with a remote control and I just put the IR reader through the bottom so I can control the light from my bed.

Love it! different colors different colors different colors

In action:

Step 5: Hang it somewhere

room shot 1

room shot 2

room shot 3

It's not quite finished yet because I need to hang the far side of the cloud but couldn't attach it yet to the ceiling. But I think the cloud looks awesome because it's so big. The fact that that little string sticks out of the cloud is just a minor aesthetic problem.

The only thing left to do is putting a Raspberry Pi in there and tell everyone that I have a cloud computer.

Thanks reddit for the idea, awesome one-day project!