Our weeSpring picks are data-driven, based on the feedback of tens of thousands of parents like you — and then subjected to an added level of testing by our editors. OXO Tot Sprout Chair The OXO Tot Sprout chair is beautifully designed and blends in with your furniture and decor. It’s sturdy but still comfortable and easy to clean. There are 4 adjustable height levels to grow with baby all the way up to a youth chair. The tray comes on and off easily with one hand so you can do it with a squirmy baby in the other, and you can even buy extra cushions to use for the next baby. The Catch: The cushions aren’t machine washable. Inglesina Fast Table Chair One of the most versatile high chairs on the market, the Inglesina Fast Table chair is a must for parents on the go. It’s the most highly-rated on weeSpring for clip-on chairs as it attaches very securely to any table, even one with a lip underneath, and travels compactly in its built-in travel bag. Some parents even note that they’ve ditched the traditional high chair altogether in favor of this one.
The Catch: It’s made of a cloth material, so just wiping it down might not be enough and you’ll have to pop it in the wash. Sometimes, you just can’t beat Ikea: at just $20 ($30 with the infant cushion), this highchair is lightweight, easy to clean, and compact. More than one weeSpring mom confessed that they traded in their $300 high chairs for this one. You can literally hose it down to clean it; one mom said, “After a night of spaghetti, throw this in the shower and call it a day.” The Catch: the tray can be tough to remove. You can also use weeSpring to see what your friends recommend! You’ll be able to see all of your friends’ picks alongside our community’s opinions. Check out more high chair reviews on weeSpring!Over in Sweden, Czech, Italy, and Belgium, Ikea is launching a new line of ‘smart’ light bulbs. These countries are apparently the test market for these bulbs, and they’ll soon be landing on American shores. This means smart Ikea bulbs will be everywhere soon, and an Internet of Light Bulbs is a neat thing to explore.
[Markus] got his hands on a few of these bulbs, and is now digging into their inner workings (German Make Magazine, with a Google Translate that includes the phrase, ‘capering the pear’). There are currently four versions of these Ikea bulbs, ranging from a 400 lumen bulb designed for track lights to a 980 lumen bulb that will probably work in an American Edison lamp socket. These lights are controlled via a remote, with each individual bulb paired to the remote by turning the lamp on, holding the remote close to the bulb, and pressing a button. Inside these bulbs is a Silicon Labs microcontroller with ZigBee support, twelve chip LEDs, and associated electronics that look like they might pass the bigclivedotcom smoke test. After tearing apart this bulb and planting the wireless module firmly in a breadboard, [Markus] found he could dim a pair of LEDs simply by clicking on the remote. Somewhere in these bulbs, there’s a possibility of doing something. As with all Internet of Things, we must ask an important question: will it become part of Skynet and shut down the Internet, like webcams did last summer?
These Ikea bulbs look pretty safe in that regard, as the bulb is inexorably tied to the remote and must be paired by holding it close to the bulb. We’re sure there are a few more interesting exploits for these bulbs, so once they’re released in the US we’ll take a look at them. If you want to create a large display with a matrix of LEDs, it’s a relatively straightforward process. Thanks to addressable LED tape and microcontrollers it becomes more of a software issue than one of hardware. [Vincent Deconinck] had some inexpensive WS2812 strips, so he sliced into an inexpensive IKEA coffee table and mounted them in a grid beneath an acrylic sheet. Some work with Arduino Nanos and a Raspberry Pi later, and he had a very acceptable LED matrix table. An attractive hack, you might say, and leave it at that. But he wasn’t satisfied enough to leave it there, and so to make something rather special he decided to add interactivity. With an infra-red emitter and receiver as part of each pixel, he was able to turn an LED table into an LED touchscreen, though to be slightly pedantic it’s not sensing touch as such.
The design of the IR sensors was not entirely straightforward though, because to ensure reliable detection and avoid illumination from the LED they had to be carefully mounted and enclosed in a tube. He also goes into some detail on the multiplexing circuitry he used to drive the whole array from more Arduinos and a GPIO expander. The write-up for this project is a long one, but it’s well worth the read as the result is very impressive. There are several videos but we’ll show you the final one, the table playing touch screen Tetris. We’re used to projects that take everyday household objects and modify or enhance them into new and exciting forms that their original designers never intended. A particular theme in this endeavour comes from the IKEA hacking community, who take the products of the Swedish furniture store and use them for the basis of their work. A particularly inventive piece of IKEA hacking is a project from [anastas.car], a low-cost 3D-printed robot arm based on Ikea Tertial lamp.
The lamp in question is a relatively inexpensive spring-balanced desk lamp that when looked at in another light has all the metalwork ready-cut for a 5 degrees of freedom robot arm when combined with 3D-printed servo holders for five servos at its joints. The resulting design has all files available on Thingiverse, and judging by the video we’ve posted below the break makes for a rather effective arm. If you’re looking to add a bit of the future to your living room, you might want to look at this tutorial to build a very professional infinity mirror table. It’s an IKEA RAMVIK coffee table, modified to include RGB LEDs and a one-way mirror for that ever-so-awesome infinity effect. And technically, you only have to cut one hole in the table. By placing a large mirror underneath the glass, wrapping the inner edge with a strip of RGB LEDs and coating the original glass top with a reflective car tint, it’s a pretty simple hack that results in a very polished product — not something that can be said for most of our projects!
But to make it even better, [Pierre] added an NFC chip under the table, allowing you to control the color with just a tap. If you want your kid to be really great at something, you have to start them out early. [Phil Tucker] must want his kid to be a video gamer pretty badly. [Phil’s] build starts with a $20 IKEA high chair. He likes these chairs because at that price point, tearing into them isn’t a big risk. What’s more is you can buy extra trays so you can use it as a modular project with different trays serving different purposes. The chair has two joysticks and two buttons, looking suspiciously like a video game controller. The current incarnation (see video, below) uses an Arduino Uno to trigger an Akai MPC1000 synthesizer via the MIDI interface. When [Eric Strong’s] son outgrew his convertible crib, he didn’t want to give it up. Needing the bed for their next youngest, [Eric] made his son a deal. He was going to build him the ultimate big boy bed. And boy did he ever!
Using Ikea Hackers for inspiration, [Eric] came up with a bed that features not only a slide, a ball game, a secret room hidden behind a bookcase, a hidden window, and a back door escape hatch — but even a bed. Kind of sounds like one of those too-good-to-be-true infomercials! And he built it using only three products from IKEA. Two Kura beds (one for building materials), a Trofast tiered shelf storage unit, and a Besta — a small bookshelf. And because he had limited space to build it, the whole thing is still modular. Stick around after the break to see it in action! Sometimes too much overkill isn’t enough. [Jesus Echavarria] hacked an IKEA Lampan light for his daughter to add color LEDs, a timer, Bluetooth control over the hue, and a local override knob. The result: a $5 lamp with at least $50 of added awesomeness. Let’s have a look at the latter. The whole lamp system is based around a PIC microcontroller and WS2811 LEDs for the color light show. Since the lamp was already built to run a 40W lightbulb, and [Jesus] wanted to retain that functionality, he added an SSR to the build.
Yeah, it’s rated for 5,000W, but it’s what he had on hand. Next comes the low-voltage power supply. [Jesus] needed 5V for the PIC, and used the guts from a cheap USB charger as a quick and dirty 5V converter — a nice hack. To power the HC-05 Bluetooth module, which requires 3.3V, he wired up a low-dropout voltage regulator to the 5V line. A level-converter IC (74LVC07) gets the logic voltage levels straight between the two. A fuse for the high-voltage power line, screw-terminal connectors all around, and a potentiometer for manual override round out the hardware build. On the software side, [Jesus] set up the knob to turn on and off the built-in lamp as well as control the colors of the LED ring. That’s a nice touch for when his daughter wants to change the lamp’s color, but doesn’t want to go find her cellphone. But when she does, the SPP Pro app sets the colors by sending pre-programmed serial commands over Bluetooth to the PIC in the lamp. All in all, a nice build, well-documented, and with enough rough edges that none of you out there can say it’s not a hack.