IKEA BARLAST “Hack”

IKEA has some really cheap LED ceiling/wall lamp, at 5€ in France. The BARLAST takes mains power and diffuses light quite nicely.

When I saw it on display in the store and saw the price tag, I knew that I could repurpose it to add some colorful lights to my living space. So naturally, I bought 6.

Housing

The goal is to open the lamp to see what’s worth keeping and eventually replace the LEDs with addressable RGB lights and control it with WLED.

The inside of the lamp is quite bare. There is a full teardown of the product on Dr. Gough Lui’s blog. For our purpose, there is unfortunately nothing to keep on the electronics side, but with a triangular screw driver (ugh), we can remove it and we are left with an empty shell with a diffuser.

I 3D printed a guide to follow with the LED strip and to reuse the screw and screw holes. The LED strip can be glued to this support and it still can be easily taken to pieces if needed to replace.

I am using a special kind of LED strip that is in a zigzag shape to facilitate bending the strip into curves and I soldered 4 pin JST connectors to both sides of the strip so that I can connect and disconnect them easily.

I also redesigned the PCB plastic housing to put the connectors inside and avoid having the cables freely moving and casting shadows.

Using 4 wire cable and JST connectors I can connect the lights together to have multiple multicolor “bubbles”.

The final has only 1 cable from outside since it has no output.

Lights and control

The control of the lights is done with WLED. I used a GLEDOPTO WLED controller that can take an input voltage from 5 to 24 volts.

The LEDs I am using are WS2815, 12V to reduce voltage drop but still single addressable - each LED can have its own color. This way I can create smooth effects and do not have to worry about power injection and I can daisy chain them for easier wiring.

Now it’s just a matter of making 6 more lights and custom length cable to connect them together, plug in a 12V power supply and it can be controlled with WLED app, through the browser on LAN or with Home Assistant !

Results

In the end the lights are really bright at night and just appear colored during the day. They provide a nice color glow and can do all sorts of effects thanks to WLED.