This project was conceptualized, designed, and built in 4 days.

4 days from our prom party, the parents asked me to make some sort of light show. I immediately started by contacting my friend Neil Janwani (@neiljanwaniprojects on instagram) and began drafting ideas on pencil and paper. I knew I had to mostly use parts I had on hand in my basement since any additional parts would have to be available on Amazon Prime for 2 day shipping. Fortunately, NeoPixel lights and electret microphones were available so the decision was to build a music reactive light stand. Additionally, Neil already had a lot of experience with music reactive lights.

The main challenge with this project was power distribution. Each of the 3 strips were drawing ~40W of power, adding up to 120W total. Additionally, we did not want this device to be tethered by a power cord so we knew we wanted to use a battery. Due to the power requirements, we used a high discharge Lithium Polymer battery giving us a run time of just under two hours, which we amended by carrying an additional battery to hot-swap when the first one depletes.

Repurposing for the college dorm

Everybody has LEDs in their college dorms, it’s the new thing. But I wanted to one-up everybody else, so I repurposed the music reactive lights project for my college dorm.

I also added an infrared receiver so I can control the lights with the unused buttons on the TV remote.

Since I can now power the LED strip from a wall outlet, the electronics got considerably smaller.

With the electret microphone, I also added some features to turn on the lights by clapping twice.