IKEA Lamp Transformed into Expanding Death Star

If you need to light up a room, there are a nearly unlimited number of lamp styles to choose from; some of which even come equipped with smart on/off functions. This wasn’t good enough for Adi Singh, however, who took an IKEA PS2014 lamp — which comes shaped like an expanding globe — and turned it into his own personal Death Star.

The first task of this build was to make it look like (one of) the infamous death-mini-planets, first painting the shell sections gray. In a rather tedious process, these parts were given a second coat of paint, then partially assembled to mask off the proper sections, and disassembled again for a coat of texture paint. This produces a nice series of trenches and valleys, before a stencil was 3D-printed and used to apply the main weapon.

With an amazing paint job applied, Singh then embedded an Arduino MKR1000 to respond to Alexa commands. A stepper motor and threaded rod assembly are employed to physically actuate the globe, and a solid-state relay (SSR) controls the lights. The results — seen in the video below — are quite pleasing, reminiscent of the space-weapon being destroyed in a flash of light!

As you might suspect, the lamp itself was inspired by science fiction movies, so it could form a good platform for other hacks. Personally, it reminds me of Darth Vader’s hyperbaric chamber, or some sort of complicated mechanical droid-orb!