Get out your glue gun and get ready to make something magical.

These adorable handmade mushroom lights will turn any room into a fairy forest realm, with lights that animate, change colors, and respond to sounds or music. They're made from "fairy light"-style NeoPixel LED lights, with stiff coated wires that bend easily into whatever shape you want. Coat the lights in hot glue and you get amazing light diffusion throughout the whole mushroom.

This guide will show you tips and tricks for making adorable mushroom shapes -- though you could easily use the same technique to make any number of glowing organic shapes, or even use a casting mold to make almost any shape you can imagine. The lights are connected to an Adafruit Mini Sparkle Motion board with WLED installed: a free, open-source LED programming interface that allows you or your young helpers to create endless animations and color combinations with just a few clicks -- no coding required.

These LEDs are made from fairly stiff wire that will hold its shape when you bend and twist it. The wires are coated in durable resin, so even though they appear to be bare wire, the wires won't short against each other.

These lights are not as good for wearables or applications where they'll get flexed again and again, but they hold up very well to being twisted into shape once and secured.

They come in a strand of 100, and they are not cuttable -- or rather, you can cut the strand but can't use the cut-off part for another project.

The Mini Sparkle Motion board is an ESP32 controller designed to work with WLED. It's small and compact and will drive hundreds of lights, powered through its onboard USB-C port. 

For a no-soldering version of this project, use this board with a pre-soldered terminal block.

Or, if you're comfortable with a soldering iron, this board comes in a slightly smaller, low profile version with solderable GPIO pins.

Sculpting with hot glue can be a bit messy. This silicone mat is the perfect surface to protect your table. The hot glue will stick to it just enough to hold your mushrooms in place, but then peels off clean and easy when it's set up.

You'll also need a USB-C type cable for loading the WLED software and powering the finished project and a JST connector (optional but helpful) to connect to the light strand.

Additional Tools & Materials

• One or more high-temp hot glue guns 
• A heat gun
• A bulk pack of Hot Glue sticks (You're gonna need LOTS of glue)
• A log, mirror, or other base for your mushrooms 
• Preserved moss for hiding the wires
• A soldering iron OR a tiny flathead screwdriver for connecting the lights

The wiring is very simple for this project. Solder or screw in your LED strip as shown:

• 5v --> +5v (Red wire)
• 32 --> DI (Middle wire)
• G --> GND (Black wire)

You can either cut the included JST connector off the lights and solder / screw them directly to the board, or you can attach a mated JST connector to your board and plug the light strand in.

If you've done it right, the lights will come on in a lovely color-shifting rainbow. Or, if you've already loaded and configured WLED, they will come on in a solid color.  The default "correct" boot-up color in WLED is a golden amber/yellow. However, my lights came on in green, which means I needed to change a setting in WLED so the software matches reality. 

Head to projectname.local (mine is mushrooms.local) in your web browser and go to Config / LED Preferences. Here in the settings you can change Color Order to RGB, which should change the lights to yellow and make the colors on the strand match the colors in the software.

Troubleshooting

If your lights didn't come on at all:

• Check the wiring and be sure the wires from the lights correspond to the correct pads. Sometimes connectors have mismatched wiring so be sure the red wire from your male connector is lined up with the red wire on your female connector. If these get switched your lights won't work.
• Check Config/LED Settings in WLED. Be sure pin 32 is selected as the GPIO pin. If it won't let you select 32, go back to the WLED Setup page in this guide and set up Audio Reactive mode first -- pin 32 is assigned to the microphone by default, for some reason, so that needs to change before 32 is available for the LED strip. Reboot the board, and try changing the LED settings again.
• Check to be sure you soldered / screwed to pin 32 and not 33 -- they're right next to each other. Either one will work, but the software needs to match the physical wiring. If you connected to 33, change the LED Settings page to use GPIO 33.
• Make sure all three wire connections are secure -- if you're using the screw terminal, tug on the wires to be sure they don't come loose. For either type of attachment, make sure no stray hair-thin wires are bridging across the pads or the terminals.
• Try reinstalling the WLED software. 

If your lights are flickering or only half on:

• Unspool the coil of lights and see if that fixes it. These wires are coated with a very thin protective layer and too much flexing or tight winding can sometimes make them short out.
• Be sure you have 100 lights defined in your strand in LED Settings.

This light strand has 100 lights. I decided to use four lights in each mushroom, giving me a total of 25 mushrooms. Each mushroom has the same number of lights, and all them are roughly the same size. This way the animation seems to move smoothly down the strand, spending the same amount of time moving "through" each mushroom.

If I were to do this project again, I'd consider giving my mushrooms a little more of a size gradient -- I'd make some tiny ones with just one or two lights and some giant ones with 6-8 lights inside. The animations wouldn't move as smoothly through -- they'd zip through the tiny mushrooms and spend more time in the large ones -- but that might give an organic feel to the motion and add a little more visual interest. Options!

This light strand is a fixed-address strand, which means we can't just cut it and use the rest with a different controller or another project. The lights are hard-coded with a pixel number so attaching a connector further down the strand would not work. Also, these wires are wicked hard to solder to since the resin coating covers the wires completely. It's possible to burn the coating off with a lighter (useful to know if you break a wire accidentally) but it's not easy.

If you want a shorter strand / fewer mushrooms that's fine -- you can cut the strand and the first pixels will still work, but the cut-off pixels are headed for the trash.

Mount the Mushrooms

I started with the idea of making a magic mushroom mirror. Laid out on the floor it looked so lovely! But I quickly realized I made my mushrooms a bit too big and heavy to securely attach in this way. 

I scrapped that idea, and instead found a lovely oak log that was already covered in wood-ear mushrooms. I used hot glue to secure the mushrooms to the top of the log, clustering them in groups of 2 or 3, and winding any excess wire around the mushroom stems.

Once they were all attached, I glued some preserved moss onto the log in between the mushrooms to cover up the wires and add a little more whimsy. It led to such a delightful result!