A $10 Ikea table was transformed into a one-of-a-kind music visualizer, complete with LED lights, electronic components and a microphone.
Author Charlie Turner wrote on Make: Magazine a step-by-step guide to building a personalized music visualizer table using an Ikea Lack table, a I2C multiplexer board and an Arduino circuitry.
According to Turner, he based his idea on the Tiny Music Visualizer project that was earlier shared by Adafruit. A popular open-source hardware company, Adafruit Industries designs and manufactures various electronic products, tools and accessories, and sells them through online retail.
The company also hosts different tutorials, as well as introductory videos for tech enthusiasts. Adafruit holds the title for being the longest running live video electronics show on the Internet.
"The Arduino code is from there [Adafruit], the circuit is from there - all I really created was a big handmade LED matrix, and put it into an Ikea table," Turner explained.
Turner also discovered some issues from the original post made by Adafruit, particularly in the circuitry, and offered some quick and easy solutions. He said the Chinese Arduino Nano clones "did not run the code properly," and advised switching to the full-sized Arduino Uno brain to solve the issue.
Installing the Arduino Uno makes the table's display "dance" to the music coming from the speakers. The Uno is a microcontroller board that features 14 digital input/output pins, six analog inputs, an ICSP header, a USB connection, a power jack, a 16 MHz quartz crystal and a reset button. The $25 chip runs by connecting it to a computer with a USB cable or any AC-DC power adapter.
According to Turner, since the music visualizer he built runs on Uno, it requires a very minimal amount of power. Users can charge the device by using an iPhone or iPad charger, or any regular USB port.
Ikea furniture is often used by do-it-yourself enthusiasts to build and create crafty projects. A quick search on the Internet would return results of more than 2.7 million of "Ikea product hack" sites that provide users tutorials on how to modify and repurpose Ikea products.
To learn more about how to build the Ikea hack music visualizer, watch the video below:
