My Personal Experience with Lava Lamps
I have always found lava lamps very interesting. So interesting in fact that I back in high school dedicated an entire research essay about them. Then in an engineering program I was in, I made an automatic lava lamp for a project. The lamp I made would turn on and off depending on the time of day. I wanted to make the lava lamp as unique as possible. So, I put small LED lights on the corners of the base of the lamp to give it a little more flare. The lava lamp took a lot of heat to get going.
To heat the “lava” in the lamp, I used an incandescent lightbulb that is hidden within the lower part of the base. Due to the heat that the lightbulb would create, I had to make a heat shield to protect the other circuitry within the lamp. Though it would work back at my home, transferring the lava lamp to the school was the most difficult. I had to disassemble the lamp to fit it firmly into a box. Then I had to worry about the wax and liquid getting messed up and I had to worry about how long it would take to heat back up. Although it wouldn’t work all the time, over time I figured out more efficient ways to heat the lamp and transfer it better. I always wanted a lava lamp and this was the perfect opportunity to get one.
