Light Up Glass

The Light Up Glass is a fixture and emits light based on ambient sound. It attaches to a glass object and projects its light through the glass. While it has no practical purpose, it makes for a great display piece.

Images

Top Left: Fixture attached to glass pipe. Middle and Top Right: Fixture lighting up pipe.

Bottom Left: Fixture fully assembled. Bottom Right: Fixture taken apart.

Video

How it Works

Light Synced to Sound

Instead of lighting up in a set pattern like a lot of light displays, the light up glass uses the sounds that its microphone picks up and emits light based on the sound. Low frequency sound corresponds to low frequency light (red). Middle frequency sound corresponds to middle frequency light (green). High frequency sound corresponds to high frequency light (blue). If there are multiple frequencies of sounds, then multiple frequencies of light will be emitted. Sound input is processed through the Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) to get its associated frequencies.

You may notice that after a sound occurs, light tends to still be emitted. In order to improve the aesthetics, the light intensity has a small decay time so that it does not switch between on and off too quickly.

Electronics

The light is controlled by an Arduino Pro Mini which contains a program written in C++. The components are pretty simple and are bought off of SparkFun.

Housing

The housing itself consists of three parts, all of which are 3D printed and painted white.

The Glass

The light up glass is built for a specific glass pipe that I found, but could easily be adapted to fit other glass objects. It does not require any sort of modification to the glass pipe as the top piece screws on over the base of the pipe to hold the pipe and the whole fixture together.