Make a Music Playing and LED Reactive Nightstand (no Programming Required)

Basically I'll show you how to make your own Night Stand that plays music and is reactive.

You will need:

Wood:
I used 1" thick wood the long beams about a foot wide and pretty long (not descriptive but pretty much its up to you)
For the legs I used beams that i believe are for stairs...but i just cut them to look like legs haha.

Now I'm not a woodworker, so by all means use fancy cuts and anything to your preference, just give yourself enough room inside to put stuff.

90 Degree brackets (to separate the lights or for me to hold in my bottom piece of wood)
speakers (your choice)
ampifier (your choice)
12v converter (your choice i used a PC power supply)
power strip (unless your using 12v LED lights)

Random stuff that I'm sure will be unique to everyone projects because of course this was just made with random stuff and im surprised it even came out looking this nice. (thank you paint lol)

LED LIGHTS (now i used a music reactive led light that i got from spencers on clearance) you can get music reactive LED controllers from ebay or find something music reactive that you can use or if you want just use leds, doesnt have to react to music!)

Now i just a fairly thick piece of plexi glass

On top of the plexi I put a sheet of plastic that's meant for (I think) florescent lights but it worked to diffuse the leds the same.

Last but not least, paint, pick some nice colors. I made this for my girlfriend so the colors worked out. You can even make sports teams colors, If its black and red, put a Tampa bay Bucs sticker on it and bam.

Plan, Test Your Materials and Begin.

Gathers my speaker materials and some wood for the main body of the night stand. Made the inside a 20" by 20" space which turned out nice, but 18"x18" might be nicer for plexiglass purposes just a heads up.

Also primed and drilled the wood together, you will soon come to learn lowes wood is very warped already and that you have to just take the straightness of the wood with a grain of salt.

Bottoms Up Start the Nightstand

Now since this NightStand is going to have the speaker on the bottom, I figured I would start from the bottom and build up.

So of course I put the bottom in, I used metal L brackets that I just found at Lowes and thought they would work (probably not for this, but hey they worked)

Then i measured and cut holes for the legs (probably better to do this BEFORE you put the speaker and the bottom in, but i was stupid so i made crappy cuts after the fact with a dremel.

Now i went ahead and stuck the speaker with the amplifier and power supply in. I drilled holes and screwed the amplifier down, i Decided to hot glue the power supply down later.

I then soldered the amplifier connections to the speaker and used an RCA to 3.5mm converter to use an Ipod to play through the speaker. So again, TEST

NOTE: the connections are alot better if you crimp what you can and then add hot glue to the crimp.

I also cut the positive to the power wire going to the amplifier so that i could put a switch for the music, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A CORRECTLY RATED SWITCH FOR THE 120V not a 12V switch for 120V you don't want to start a fire or kill yourself

Add Some Legs!

Now this is my first time EVER working with wood. So i put the legs on after (bad idea i think) so if you know wood. Do if your way, because my way sucks lol

But here i added the stairway poles of course :p my mock legs and i did it uncut which was also stupid should have cut them down before.

I put the legs up so that between the legs and the top of the box was enough room to put the plexiglass and the diffuser sheet so that roughly it would be fairly flush

Now the Hard Part

So i found out that the plexiglass dipped between the legs so i found a long piece of plastic at lowes that had holes and have was 90 degrees. So i cut that and put it flush with the legs and put it in between to spot the plexiglass from dipping downwards.

Turns out the 90 degree plastic piece was cheap and pretty good at holding stuff up. So i also put it right above my electronics pieces to hold up a sheet of cardboard that would hold my LED lights. and put a hold in the cardboard to run the switch to the bottom of the box.

I also ran the power cable to a power strip that I had put into the box, the power strip had the amplifier plugged in and the LEDs and was on all the time (hence the 2 switches one for LED and one for Music) Unfortunately i dont have a picture of the power strip but it from out of the same hole that the

Almost Done

Now i super glued and liquid nailed EVERYTHING underneath so the speaker, the sides of the walls, the screws, the amplifier the power supply the power strip the 3.5mm tables and power strip wire. the switches, EVERYTHING.

I went ahead and painted 2 primer white coats, and 2 blue coats.

All blue after i painted one leg seemed too much. So i left 2 legs white and then decided i needed to add white to the body of it. So i ended up buying a white wooden T from michaels and glued it on.

Let each coat of primer dry for 24 hours, then each coat of actual paint dry for 6-8

Done!

Now i had to sand the legs after down to make the table not wobble haha, but im sure a good woodworker could have done that before when putting the legs on.

After all is said and done, its not that bad!

I'm sure people won't have all the same supplies, most people will actually know the proper things to use instead of the crap i just found at lowes and thought it would work.

But this should give some hope to people who can't program. Goodluck and hope to see some other peoples variations of it!