This is the final version of replacing my 20 years old "lava lamp" that runs with a 60 watt bulb and needs at least 1 hour to warm up.
The new version uses 20 RGB-LEDs each controlled by a single WS2812 RGB-Controller. It uses only 5 or 6 watt and providing 8 different modes that are controlled by a Arduino pro mini 328 5V/16MHz board.
The potentiometers with knobs are used to switch between the modes and control speed, color or brightness of the several modes.
The LEDs are glued on a wooden staff placed inside a smoothed acrylic glass cylinder.
It took about two days creating this lamp including soldering the 120 pads and about 70 wires, crafting the mechanical part and writing the Arduino-Sketch that gets the lamp to life.
Thanks to the people created the fastspi-library: Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.
Edit: 2013/03/04 - added documented source code to this post.
Lavalamp_2_0.ino (10.3 KB)