Building a Wall Lamp From Scratch

Somehow, I spent 8 months of my free time designing and building a wall lamp from scratch. I didn’t have prior experience in woodworking or LED strips. Read on for how it came to be (and how it turned out).AmbitionsThe lamp topic actually started with the living room.Having moved recently, I still had a gap to fill on the wall. Indirect lighting is the best kind of lighting (this needs no debate), so why not build a wall lamp that illuminates the whole living room? And while switched off, it’s an art piece? Consisting of lasercut Plexiglas panels that are backlit by LED strips, with support for animations? With wood paneling on the sides to make it look more classy?Daydreaming of what this elusive piece of furniture could look like, I drew some mock-ups. I then came to my senses and realized:I had never worked with LED strips before,I had no clue how to mount the Plexiglas panels,I had no idea how to design the lamp so it could be mounted on the wall, andI had zero experience in woodworking.I estimated that starting and finishing this project would take me 2 years, with a 99% chance of it never being finished. So I just hung paintings instead:After congratulating myself for being such a mature decision-maker, I stepped into the rabbit hole of DIY lamps anyway, by building a simpler wall lamp for the bedroom. The idea would be to build a lamp as an art study, collecting enough experience to have a realistic chance of building that elusive lamp in the future.So back to daydreaming, the best phase of any DIY project.Mock-UpsIn the bedroom, the bed frame is made of beech wood. A wall lamp with beech wood panels that have LED strips hidden behind them would complement this well.Roughly like this, but twice as long and not for 600€:Or like this:but with individually controllable LEDs so that different sections can light up, and it can either illuminate the room or just be a reading light. Ahh, daydreaming.The next day, I committed myself and bought a second-hand beechwood countertop from the local classifieds, for 15€. It had legs attached that I didn’t need, but those turned out to be discontinued IKEA legs that sold for 30€ on ebay. 💰💰💰That was back in May 2025.Back to the mock-ups, specifically, designs that would fit the aesthetic of the bed:I went with design #1. The black rectangles would be backlit Plexiglas panels.My aspirations were clean-looking wooden panels from all angles, without visible bolts or cutouts. I did not know yet how the panels would be physically connected to each other. A milling and drilling solution where the panels are connected with threaded rods was thinkable, but had me worried about structural integrity and my wooden panels not being thick enough.Instead, I planned to build a frame out of standardized aluminium extrusion parts to which the wooden panels could be attached. (I also had never worked with such aluminium parts before.) Here’s a mock-up from mid-June 2025:The LED strip would wrap all around the aluminium extrusion, hidden behind the wooden panels. The power supply and control electronics would hopefully fit behind the panels. The mounting mechanism was not thought through at this point.Around this time, I made the mistake (?) of chatting with my work colleagues about my lighting ambitions. Anyway, on to building this thing.Build LogAugust 2025 – PlanningA lot of time was spent on planning what components to use.The LED strips would be SK6812 ones. 5V strips have the downside that long segments need power injection in multiple locations to end up with consistent brightness, but the compact lamp layout would make this easy.For the LED controller I’d use a QuinLED Dig-Uno, which I decided for after watching a comparison video by @MakeItWorkTech (highly recommend!).WLED as the software was an easy pick.The WLED power calculator told me a 75W power supply would suffice. A Meanwell PSU would do the job. Colleagues advised me against picking those for their coil whine (jumping ahead: it’s a non-issue).$LLM told me I would need LED diffusors, otherwise LED hotspots would be visible. I obliged and picked tall ones after watching this massively useful comparison video.For the aluminium extrusions, I would be using 3030 and 3060 sizes (30x30mm, 30x60mm) based on gut feeling, and because the Meanwell PSU and Dig-Uno are 30mm tall.Early September 2025 – Sizing and Parts OrderingOnto sizing. The PSU is the largest component hidden behind the wooden paneling and dictates the height of the panels and the aluminium extrusions. The overall width would be 180cm. With 60 LEDs/m, I would end up with roughly 220 individual LEDs.To avoid bad surprises after cutting/drilling anything, I maintained a CAD model throughout the project in OpenSCAD:Barebones CAD model, early SeptemberI ordered all the parts, unleashing a fork bomb of non-reroutable shipments for my neighbors to accept while I wasn’t home.Late September 2025 – Aluminium Test FitA test fit with the aluminium extrusions revealed that connectors in the inner corners would be too weak for the load I expected.I ordered 2x2 connector plates that would connect the aluminium parts on the outside.Mid-October 2025 – Shifting GearsA certain colleague at work remembered me musing about indirect lighting in May and asked about the project status over lunch. At this point, little tangible progress had been made.I have great colleagues, so that conversation ended with bets being placed by multiple people on when this lamp project would (ever) be done. The bets ranged from December 1st 2025 (impossibly early) to April 15th 2026 (an insult dressed up as a bet).I picked up the pace.Late October 2025 – WoodworkingI couldn’t put off the irreversible step of cutting the countertop much longer. I got it done, that is, someone else cut it for me at the local makerspace: November 2025 – Wall Mounting DecisionsIn June’s mock-up, the lamp was mounted with three hypothetical wall hooks:These hooks would either have to reach over the circumferential LED strip or interrupt it, producing shadows or ugly dark spots. Basically, they would maximally spoil the aesthetics. Can’t have that.After thinking long and hard, I decided for the mounting solution with the best visuals and best structural stability: two wall hooks that mount into custom mounting plates attached to the aluminium extrusions, hidden behind the boxed-in section of the lamp:This solution would also be the best in creating additional engineering effort, cost, project delays, and general headache. Let me elaborate:The wooden panels are heavier than the extrusions. Looking at the lamp from the side, the center of gravity would therefore be several centimeters away from the wall. The optimal mounting point that minimizes mechanical stress on the extrusions is close to the center of gravity, e.g. in between wood and extrusions:Accommodating space for the tip of the wall hook and the mounting plate requires routing a pocket into the wooden panels, either with a handheld or CNC router (neither of which I had used before).Each mounting plate needs to support 6-7kg. I would not trust a plastic 3D printed part to sustain this load over time.Looking at the lamp from the front, the center of gravity is not centered between the wall hooks, because I thought in June that an asymmetric lamp would look cool (and had already cut the countertop that way):Naïvely hanging the lamp on the two wall hooks would result in the right side tipping down, with the left wall hook not contributing anything. A balancing solution would be needed, either by adding ballast to the left side, or by removing material on the right side.The obvious solutions to these challenges are to look for thinner wooden panels to reduce weight, or to fix the asymmetry by shortening the right panel, but those are weak solutions. I’d rather engineer myself out of the corner I’ve engineered myself into.Hence, I designed the mounting plates and ordered galvanized steel versions from PCBWay. With that, I crossed off my bucket list item of ordering custom steel parts for a hobby project. 🙂Routing the pockets to fit those parts in — well, back to youtube for watching tutorials. To fix the asymmetry, I would be using ballast steel pellets I still had lying around from another project.Mid-November 2025 – Plexiglas PanelsLED-backlit Plexiglas is all the rage for WLED projects on the internet. There exists a material that appears black when lit from the front, and color translucent when lit from behind. I had to experience this wondrous material myself.The exact product name is Plexiglas Black & White 9H04 SC. To save myself from more makerspace visits for lasercutting, I had my parts cut and shipped from Acrylglas Shop in Germany.Quick demonstration with the protective film still on:Mid-December 2025 – Routing & DrillingIt was time to get serious with marrying aluminium and wooden panels. The two wooden panels would be affixed to the aluminium parts with L-shaped aluminium brackets.First step: marking out the drill holes for the L-brackets and the pockets for the steel wall mounting plates: 3D printed alignment jigs for drill holes and pocketsThe pre-tapped M8 threads in the extrusions came in handy (see the left photo). I had paid extra for them when buying the aluminium parts three months prior, without a concrete use case in mind. Lucky me!I took my parts and templates to the makerspace and routed the four pockets with a handheld router equipped with a guide bushing.