The starting idea here is a smart lamp unlike anything else in the DIY concrete space: a solid-looking sphere that splits horizontally to expose warm light glowing from within. The maker, DIY Ed, describes it as an original concrete concept, and it is hard to argue with that. A shell of quick-mix concrete with Trass forms the body, cast in half a styrofoam sphere with chunks of the same material mixed in as aggregate. A green glass wine bottle sits in the center as an inner cylinder, and the stand is a four-legged piece of square hardwood joined with dowels and white adhesive, with a through-hole in the middle for the wiring.
The motion comes from a Wemos D1 mini driving a geared stepper through a T8 threaded rod and an 8x8 flexible coupling, with printed cylindrical guide tubes and flanges forming the sliding mechanism. The maker sanded those printed tubes by hand until the vertical travel ran smooth and silent, which took patience but paid off in a mechanism with no wobble or sticking. An infrared sensor pokes through an angled passage in the top dome, and the electronics live on a compact green perfboard with header pins and screw terminals.
Control options cover Alexa, a Xiaomi smart home hub, or a television remote, and the Arduino IDE code handles the motor timing, lighting delays and recovery after a power cut. The 3D parts and code are shared on Thingiverse for anyone who wants to replicate it.
The one trade-off is the casting itself: the mold had to be turned after five to six hours to stop the concrete bonding permanently, and even then the demolded surface needed fresh mortar to fill the voids before the dome was scraped smooth.
Project by DIY Ed. Watch it on their YouTube channel: