I saw this interesting Little Big Lamp project to make an LED desk lamp on Make, and it looked easy enough to make, so I gave it a shot. It involved making a circuit with a 555 timer and darlington array to control the brightness of the LEDs, and a case made out of PVC piping and ABS plastic. It went relatively smoothly, though I had a lot of help with tools and experience from a friend.
Here's some pictures of the building process:
Here's some pictures of the final result:
One thing I didn't like about the original design was that the cord from the power supply was directly soldered into the circuit board of the lamp, and there was no power switch on the lamp. While there might have been a dimmer, there was no easy way to shut the lamp off without unplugging it from the wall. So I added both a power switch, and a barrel plug for the plug on the power supply so the cord could be removed and easily replaced.
One issue I did have is that I tried to avoid buying the extension spring called for in the design for bending the PVC pipe smoothly after you heat it up with the heat gun, and we just tried to bend it around another cylindrical object. This did not produce good results, as the circular shape of the pipe flattened. You can see how my first attempt didn't look great:
It almost looked alright, but I decided to try again with the spring to help the pipe not cave in on itself or fold, and the results were much better:
As you can see though, the spring itself wasn't so lucky. After the PVC re-hardened, it was quite difficult to remove the spring, and I had to use so much force pulling it out that it got bent.