Work in-progress: Crystal Lamp, a nice ornament for my bookshelf.
That beautiful hunk of quartz came from the Ron Coleman mine in Arkansas, a great place to visit if you’re passing through. I’m working on adding brightness effects to mix it up, but so far I am very happy with the results. I also plan to add an audio visualizer mode, as soon as Adafruit Industries restocks their new electret mic with auto gain control!
Beautiful combination of man-made-light and natural materials.
That’s a nice rock 
was “crystal” castles in the a background a presentation choice or happenstance? lol. great project! I saw something of this ilk for sale that used salt rock, but this will be much more complex in its beauty.
@Jeremy_Ross Just serendipity, but good catch!
It looks even better IRL, with all the little internal fractures and inclusions of the primary crystal being lit through the adjoining ones. I have another 15 Flora NeoPixels to play with, and would like to experiment with other natural “diffusers,” like smoky quartz, salt rock or other more exotic species. Unfortunately, large, high quality minerals can get kind of expensive…
how much do peices like that go for??
what do the stones cost?
i mean the rock lol
This one was $40 on their showroom in Arkansas. Online they appear to be more expensive for crystal clusters approximately the same size.
Sorry for the triple post that’s not to bad at all
How did you go about ligthing this? are the LEDS below the crystal, facing up? Do yo have any fully lit pictures of the setup perchance?
This is lit by 5 Neopixel Flora v2s from @Adafruit_Industries . You can see them in the video, wired around the back of the crystal. I decided not to risk drilling into the quartz as that is very hard to do without shattering the crystal.
I concealed them and made them into a sort of clip-on prosthetic for the crystal using some InstaMorph moldable plastic. Not exactly my favorite material to work with, as you have to heat and re-heat it to mold it into shape, but it does hide them and diffuse the light pretty good.
I don’t consider this project to be fully complete, but I will try to post some photos of the build when I get home later. Ultimately, I want to get a Beetle or some other small Arduino-like MC to drive it and have my buddy 3D print a bespoke base to conceal the MC and stabilize the crystal base.
woops, the video wasnt loading before and the preview didnt show the LEDs. I see it now! Is there too much clouding in the crystals on the bottom to light from the bottom? And yeah, drilling quartz is fairly difficult IIRC
The bottom of this quartz piece is very foggy, and didn’t let enough light through when I tried to light it that way. I decided to light it from the back side because it allowed me to target individual crystals in the cluster.
Makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!
No problem. Great minds think alike!
I went to the local rock shop here to check out their quartz and was in heaven. Too bad I don’t have thousands to drop on all those pretty rocks 
Haha yeah, I’m in NYC where just about anything like that is bound to be over priced, especially compared to visiting a mine directly