Resin and oak sunflower wall light driven by WLED

Nov 07, 2026 Last reply: 2 hours ago 4 Replies
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Most of what fills this forum is light thrown at a wall behind a screen, so a decorative sunflower fixture cut from oak and resin makes a nice change of pace. Instead of bias lighting, the maker built a sculptural piece where the LEDs are the artwork, and the whole thing runs on WLED.



The construction mixes wood, resin and electronics. The parts were cut on a CNC machine, and the lighting comes from just two sources: one 16 by 16 LED matrix and one strip of WS2812B. The outer ring holds petal-like segments with translucent panels backlit in yellow and amber, separated by dark ribs. At the center, an intricate spiral phyllotaxis lattice sits over the internal LED array, with a circular illuminated hub at its heart. A single cord runs upward from the top of the fixture.



What stands out to me is how much depth two light sources give it. Hung on a rough cinder-block wall in a dark room, with a blue wash spreading across the masonry around it, the piece cycles through dynamic animations that sweep through the spiral grid. There is no moving component anywhere in the fixture, so every bit of life in it comes from the light itself, which is a neat constraint to work within.



The one open question for me is how it reads in daylight. The glow clearly carries the design at night, and I would be curious whether the oak grain and resin panels hold the piece together on their own when the LEDs are off. From the two extra photos the maker shared in the comments, hopefully that side of it comes through too.


The choice I keep coming back to is the phyllotaxis lattice over the 16 by 16 matrix. Mapping a natural spiral pattern onto a plain square grid seems like a clever way to hide the gridiness of a matrix, and it turns a cheap panel into something that looks organic. The trade-off is that any effect has to respect that spiral layout or it will break the illusion.

Does anyone know how the wiring is handled? There is a single cord running up from the top of the fixture, but as far as I can tell the maker has not explained how one line feeds both the matrix and the WS2812B strip. I would be interested to know whether the data is chained through or split somewhere inside.

The maker has not gone into the wiring, so there is nothing to quote on how that cord is routed or split. What has been confirmed is the setup on the electronics side: WLED for control, one 16x16 matrix and one strip of WS2812B, and no moving parts in the fixture. Maybe the extra photos in the comments give a hint about the internals.

Since the fixture has no moving component, I would suggest an effect that makes the spiral appear to rotate, with the bright point creeping outward from the central hub along the lattice. A slow drift like that could give the seed head a living, turning quality while the hardware stays perfectly still. Paired with the existing sweeping animations, it might add a second mood to the piece.

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