LED Health & Mana Potions

As my first venture into embedded electronics and soldering, I thought this would be a good project to learn the basics. The idea is fairly simple, create a glowing Health and Mana potion, that could sit on a shelf and be a nice decorative electronics project.

The Materials:
      -Wooden Corner shelf
      -Arduino Development Board
      -9 Volt DC Power Adapter
      -2 Square Cork Top Bottles
      -Red and Blue Food Colouring
      -6 RGB LEDs
      -6 270 Ohm Resistors
      -Solid Core red and black wire
      -Small Screws
      -2 small “L” shaped brackets
      -Electronics Solder
      -White Glue

The Tools:
      -Multimeter
      -Soldering Iron
      -Drill
      -Screw Driver
      -Saw

To do this I wrote a short C program for the Arduino to fade in an out 2 red LED's for the health potion and 2 blue LED's for the Mana potion. I also added 2 extra LED's near the back of the bottle, 1 blue for the health potion and 1 red for the mana potion. The idea was to create a slight color changing effect to the bottle to make it feel more like the bottles were alive with magic.

                        

I drilled three holes in the shelf and glued the LED's in the holes, this would allow the bottles sit on the shelf nicely with the LED's positioned under each of the two bottles. I then soldered in the wiring and the resistors into place and then plugged them into the Pulse width modulation outputs on the Arduino. Brackets and a spare piece of brown shelving were used to create a wall to cover up the electronics.

While I wasn't exactly impressed with my craftsmanship on the shelf and the blocker, I did get the basics of the wood working aesthetics down. The fading effect of the LED's gave a nice feeling to the potions making them look quite magical, which was what I was going for.

You can check out the effect the light has on the bottles in the video below. If you want to do a similar project you can use the code I developed by downloading it from the above link. Enjoi!