If you feel like your living room needs some mood lighting, Brian Slevin from Brickablocks recently published these instructions for building a round lamp base with Legos. Once you have assembled the 400 individual Lego pieces, you can plug in the internal wiring, add a lightbulb, slap on a lampshade, and bask in your modular illumination.

Slevin offers build photos along with a free PDF template on his website. He admits finding 400 Lego pieces all in the same color is a daunting task, although it would also be pretty cool to work in a pattern or design with pieces of varying colors.

The free tool Slevin uses to design his Lego builds is Lego’s own Digital Designer. He says,

It helps with brainstorming because you can reach for an enormous variety of parts without cluttering up your workspace. Once I am happy with the general design, I export the model into a format compatible with a more sophisticated CAD modeling tool called MLCAD, which allows me to manipulate the assembly order.

Then, Slevin uses a Lego documentation publishing tool called LPub to draft the build instructions. The CAD tools he uses are also free downloads available from LDraw.

“My background is in software development, so graphics rendering and CAD modeling are skills I am acquiring on the fly,” says Slevin. He’s currently acquiring parts to build the lamp again in white and brown, so he’s hoping to improve his published instructions. As Makers can surely understand, sharing instructions and build notes is a very important part of the online Lego community. We’re looking forward to seeing more Lego creations from Brickablocks, and if you build this be sure to share it in the comments below.

[via Reddit]