Introduction
Ever since I started living in my own home, I've always wanted to do some interesting things with LEDs to liven the place up. A first stab at the concept was to make a standalone LED-lamp that could be screwed into an ordinary fixture but could spit out different colours. I liked the effect that had, but the amount of light coming out of it wasn't enough to enlighten my complete living room.
I knew that one of the reasons that the single lamp didn't work is that I tried to replace an incandescent bulb with LEDs. That usually leads to a host of problems: an incandescent lamp is a relatively small thing, with no built-in ways to get rid of excessive heat quickly. If you want to replace it with LEDs, you usually can't do much but replace it with one to three high-power LEDs. The amount of light they emit is limited, though, both by the number of them as well by the fact that getting rid of the waste heat in such a small enclosure can be difficult. With led-lighting, it's usually better to put a lot of them on a big surface: that way the LEDs can remain smaller which makes the heat problem practically go away.
I decided I had to do design a nice place for the LEDs to live in which wasn't inspired by designs based on incandescent bulbs. After browsing around, I noticed people got quite some good results by having their room indirectly lit by LEDs reflecting on a white wall. I have a white wall in my room which will probably remain that way due to it being the surface my beamer projects on, so I could copy that idea directly.
Ofcourse, I wouldn't be satisfied with a wall that could only be one single color, so I had to do something about that too.
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