Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Oak, Glass, and Bluetooth. My awesome porch light”.
Thanks for joining me, I am so excited to share this project with you. I’Ve been working on it for a long time and I love the way it turned out. I think you’re gon na, like it too, for this project, our partners Leviton, issued a challenge to me. They said, build the ultimate porch light and at first I was like unfortunate two porch light right.
Then I stood there and I look down the street. I looked at my house, my unique and interesting and cool house, and I have this boring porch light and that just wasn’t gon na do so. What does the ultimate porch light? Look like well, in my opinion, it would have to be handmade. I don’t have to be a work of art; it would have to be something that the neighbors would look at as they walk by and think wow, that’s pretty, or something that I would be excited to see as I pull into the driveway. On top of that, it needs to be smart, and that’s where the Levitan comes in they’ve equipped me with some of their Decorah digital Bluetooth, enabled dimmers and switches, and that’s gon na. Allow me to do a few things. I’M gon na be able to turn the light on and off from outside, which is awesome, and then, when I travel I’ll, be able to set timers on it’s turn on and off at different times to make.
It seem like somebody’s home. Also awesome. Now the artistic part that’s up to me. I had this idea to make this artistic piece of the Sun setting through the woods, and I thought that Voronoi structures would be the perfect way to start so in fusion 360, I got the free plugin to make these structures and I started creating a shape and Then deleting some of these loops, so that some of it will still be solid when I extrude it you’ll see what I mean here in a moment after I extruded this shape, I ended up with the overall structure that I would use.
I had to create a couple of these and make a few modifications to it for the final piece, so I captured this and I brought it into Photoshop to start deciding on glass colors. I knew that the shape the frame itself would be wood and the rest would be glass. Now I haven’t had an art class since I was about 13 or 14, so I was a little bit nervous about how I’d be able to pull this off, but by sampling, some colors, and what I thought was a pretty picture. I think I did okay.
I wanted the Sun coming through kind of right here in the middle, with a mixture of the sky leaves and grass towards the bottom and top. I was pretty pleased with how it was looking so far. Here’S some reclaimed wood that I’ve been holding on to for this project. These cracks really shouldn’t affect how this project comes together. I threw it on my CNC router and started to face it. You can see here.
My end mill is longer than my dust shoe, so it made an incredible mess. Note that it’s kind of slightly crooked here on my table and that ended up being something I had to repair much later in the process. It’S kind of fun to see how those little bits of wood move around on the board due to vibration. I don’t know about you guys, but I really find something therapeutic about vacuuming up all these huge piles of sawdust cutting the shapes into the board required a little bit of trial and error.
I ended up using a pocket to grind away all the wood when I was doing outlines just cutting out lines. I had a hard time getting it to work right without sticking a screw through every individual piece. So pockets worked great after that there was lots of sanding involved. You can see here there’s these little kind of furry edges from the end mill that the sanding smoothes out and takes away.
Remember I’ve done all this twice. The end result is this two pieces that are nearly identical. One piece has these pockets on the inside that will be used to hold the glass. I wanted to put the stain on ahead of time.
That way, I wasn’t getting it all over the glass and having to clean it off here’s an array of stained glass, both old and new, that I’d collected for this project. So I looked at this picture on my phone and compared it to the different colors to decide what went with their here’s the process you trace out the shape on the glass, and then you cut your glass with with a glass cutter. This one was kind of dull. You can see I’m struggling with it a bit here.
I use a sharper one for most of the rest of the pieces. After you score your glass, it breaks easily right along the score, another score, another break and so on. Until you have pretty much the shape that you want, some grinding helps get it into the perfect shape, and it just drops in place. You do this over and over and over until the whole thing’s done. You can see here that the glass cutting part is a very time-consuming and manual process.
Here I am tracing out a bunch of pieces to get the optimal amount of glass used for the cuts. I cut a bunch, shape them and place them where I need them. After all, the pieces are cut they’re kind of dirty.
They have pin marks on them, so I have to clean them up you’ll notice that they wiggle around a bit in their holes. So I used a hot glue gun and a few strategic globs to hold them in place, so they wouldn’t rattle. Whenever I move the art or move around and reveal too much sunlight. I was careful not to add too much hot glue because remember I’ve got to glue these two pieces together and they need to fit snugly a thin layer of glue over the entire back.
Of course, careful not to get it on. The glass is what’s going to hold this together, I clamped it as best I could really. I could have used an additional two or four or six or eight clamps. You can never have too many clamps, but after a day of drying, it turned out really. Well. I was super excited at this point.
Unfortunately, my initial cuts with it being slightly off-center, meant that I had a small repair I needed to do to one side: it’s visible right there. On top, so I cut a thin slice if that same reclaimed, wood and just glued it on to the side there, where I’d cut too shallow a hole, more sanding on the edges and an extra coat of stain over the whole thing really brings it together. I love the way this turned out. It’S absolutely gorgeous. It can stand on its own in your yard as a piece of art, but this is for a porch light. So it’s time to get started with the rest. I took an LED fixture and disassembled it so that I could get the light bars out of it and mount on this piece of plywood as a base for the porch light. I mounted them in a way to try to get as wide of a dispersion of the light as possible.
Then it was time to actually wire in my switches. My breakers were not labeled, so I took this opportunity to turn every single one off and figure out what it was. Turning on and off around my house, once I had the power off time to dig into that light, switch the lighting and wiring in my house is a bit of a nightmare, so I’m not going to get into the exact wiring here.
Luckily, Levitan includes fantastic directions with their switches, just follow the directions and you’ll make it through after the switches were installed, testing and working. I put the faceplate on I like this snap-on method, so you can’t see screws on the outside and if they thought I had by leaving these little gaps so that I could go in and adjust the distance out from the wall to be just right. I love the way it looks.
It’S nice and clean connecting with the app is super simple and you could turn the light on and off. You can see the little status lights there moving up and down it’s kind of neat. I really like this advanced setting here. If you go into the advanced settings, you can change how quickly the light fades on or fades off.
If you’ve got a dimmable light watch those little status lights, you can see them drop at the speed that I just selected and then, whenever I travel out of town scheduling an event, is super easy. So, for example, Here I am loading up and selecting Monday. I want it to go to 99 or well actually 80 % power at sunset, and it’s saved the end that easy testing it outside. You can see it works just fine from a decent distance away off and on works.
Great. My only complaint at this point is that I bought the wrong LEDs to fully take advantage of the fading. The ballast on my LEDs doesn’t really handle it very well, but the end result is gorgeous. In my opinion.
I love the way this turned out. The glow at night is just beautiful thanks, so much for watching this. I hope you learned something about the process or how you can make your own stuff. Even if you don’t have an artistic background, I also want to say a special thank you to Levitan.
If it weren’t for your technology and your partnership, I wouldn’t have been able to build this awesome. Porch light be sure to give a big thumbs up and subscribe to this website for more cool projects. You .