DIY Smart Stone Lamp With Gas Leakage Detection

Hello people in this instructables i will show you guys how i made this natural stone lamp which is also a gas leakage detection device.

You can call this as a mini deskside lamp too that will sit beside your work setup and when it detects any gas leakages it flashes red color light.

There are many instances in which this stone lamp is considered useful! imagine you are camping and your small gas can used in mini stoves starts leaking if your nose doesn't sense the gas this device will.

Since on standby this stone lamp displays hues of different color it is cool to see the vivid colors.

Also there is no specific instance that you need to consider before building this! just build this and keep it by the side of your desktop so that you can show off your make to your friends.

I will explain in short what this stone lamp does

This stone lamp illuminates bright vivid light from under the stone powered by a 8 bit ARGB ring light and at this point this will act as a normal lamp.

But when gas leakage is detected by the senor this stone illuminate flashes of red light from below to alert the viewer.

I have taken advantage of the stone color and texture to showcase the natural colors.

The build phase of this project was very exciting and i'm very much eager to share it with you people.

From finding the right stone to testing this project i have explained everything in step by step so that even a beginner can follow and take advantage.

I have given a working video of this project in the last parts of this instructables check that out too.

Ok, Now i will jump to the build phase of this project, all the best and stay tuned till the end.

These are the materials that you will need to build this project

Natural Stone(Finding this was a long story i have given a separate explanation in the below step)

Dont have a river? no worries get stones from amazon

8 bit Pixel Ring Light

MQ135 Gas sensor(can also use mq2)

3D Printer(parts printed is shown in this step, about designing this i have a separate step dedicated below)

Cura Slicer

PLA Filament

Jumper Cable

Arduino IDE

Soldering Iron and Wire

Brush

Dish Wash Liquid

Small Container

Glass of Water

Sanding Paper

Super Glue

USB (Type-C) Cable

I have not given links for commonly available household items! Note that these are affiliate links and upon qualifying sales i will get small percent of commission at no extra cost to you

I took some of my time to find the perfect stone for this project. So I headed over to the small stream of river that was flowing beside my house.

After doing some pick and drop trials, I was able to find a perfect stone.

The one i found is light creamish in color, which is perfect for illuminating the light coming from its bottom.

To make the stone usable for this project i will start cleaning the stone.

There are two steps that needs to be followed while cleaning the stone.

The first one is the pre-cleanup. As soon as I got the stone out from the river, I used a toothbrush to remove the algae and other elements that was attached to the stone.

Since I found that the whole stone was big enough and was not really necessary for this project, I took just the tip of the stone(Just used hammer to slice the tip off)

Once the stone was cleaned up, I later brought it back to the home, used the dishwashing liquid for further cleaning.

Then i removed the excess part from the tip by rubbing the base to the sandpaper. Minor irregularities is okay but big ones need to be avoided.

Add water to the dishwash liquid, Rinse this stone for few minutes and with the brush start cleaning.

In my case it took me 15 to 20 minutes to achieve this satisfactory results, Now again wash the stone and pat dry.

The goal is to bring the stone to its natural color(the core resembles the original color) and this process will almost give that results.

This step can be done only after you decide the shape and size of the stone.

Considering the size of the stone, I designed the base and the holder for this project. I will be using Tinkercad to design the 3D printed parts.

I just drew the outline of my stone base and drew a circle around it, there should be a minimum gap of 10mm between the outline and the design, suppose the stone base is 75mm the design should be 85mm.

There are a total of four parts in this project

Holder, which is essential for carrying all the electronics inside it.

Second is the stone holder(4mm thick to hold the stone), and the third being the stone base, and the fourth will be the ring.

You can simply use the STL files that is given in the step below. Just import these STLs to any slicing software i will be using Ultimaker Cura.

I have attached the settings that i used during slicing each model and you can follow the same when you are slicing the design.

You can use any other software, Later I 3D printed the parts using PLA filament.

I will be using only black and white PLA filament to print the main parts(the side ring was printed with red filament)

Make sure you will be using white-sided border to the stone, because other colors won't illuminate the colors from the ring light.

The time for 3d printing totally depends on the printer that you are using, In my case the overall print time to print all these 4 parts was less than 3 hours.

Once you get the 3d printed parts you can start building the circuit.

Here, the circuit diagram is not too much complex. We will be using only two electronic modules here.

First one is the 8-bit ring light that is made up of ARGB LEDs, and the second one is the MQ-135 gas sensor module.

I will begin by connecting the gas sensor module A0 to pin 3 and D0 to pin number 4 on the ESP32 C3 Super Mini board.

Now for the signal pin of the ring light, I will be utilizing the pin number 2.

Here, I have made small changes in the wiring to shrink the overall wiring size of this circuit.

Connect the ground of the LED ring module and the gas sensor to common ground and i did the same for the positive pin(5v pin) as well.

After you make this modification, make sure you are insulating the joints(i used hot glue)

Once this is done, you can simply go ahead and upload this program. I have given the arduino program below.

Just paste it in your Arduino IDE, select proper port number, and select the board type as ESP32 C3 Developer Module, and click on upload.

If you face any issues, make sure you have the updated libraries. Once you upload the program, if everything is fine, the LED should glow up, and now we can test the circuit.

To test the circuit, all you have to do is expose sensor to the gas from the lighter, and the ixel ring should blink with a red color. If you see this, you are good to go.

After you verify the circuit we can install them on the 3d printed enclosure but here we need to make some modifications to the stone part

This is a little bit tricky part, but I will explain you in a very simple way. The circular ring that we 3D printed earlier will be the holder that allows stone to be in touch with the base holder.

We need to do this since the stone is irregular in shape and we cant directly 3d print a part for this so i found this simple method.

All you have to do is heat this circular ring and just press the sides firmly to the corners of the stone, so that you will have the size and shape of the stone.

Now you just add drops of super glue from one end until this 3D printed circular ring completely encircles the border of the stone.

Now attach this to the base or circular holder. Once you attach all the electronics inside the base, you can just attach the ring light using hot glue.

You can also see this in the above step.

Once you have done this, fuse the base and the top part, and to couple them I will be using small drops of super glue.

Now at this point we have almost done with the finishing of this project. Now we can move ahead and go to the testing of this project.

Like a farmer who is excited to see the yield from the plant he just planted, Likewise, a hobbyist's most exciting part is to see his creation coming to life.

So now we are in the phase of testing. To test this or use this project, all you have to do is connect the ESP32 board to USB power supply.

As we all know, ESP32 board comes with Type-C. So I will be connecting Type-C connector to one end of the ESP32 board and the other end of USB to the power bank.

As soon as the power is connected, the LED blinks with warm hues of rainbow light, and then by this time the gas sensor will be calibrated and be ready for testing.

Now I will be exposing the gas sensor to the gas from the lighter.

As you can see, the lighter, when exposed to the sensor, makes the ring light or the stone to show red flashes of light, and when the gas sensor stops detecting the leakages, the green color light will be flashing and then back to the rainbow hues of light.

So when idle, this device acts as a desk lamp, and when any gas leakage is detected, it automatically alerts by flashing the red color light.

This was all about this project. If you have any questions, ask in the comment box.

Also, I would like to see your makes in the i made it section.

This was all for now. Thank you and hope you like my idea.

Also, don't miss to check my step-by-step video tutorial and testing of this stone light project inside this video. Thank you.