LED converting an IKEA Espressivo desk lamp

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LED converting an IKEA Espressivo desk lamp

Post by zero cool »

In my quest to old-ify my life, I figured it'd be fitting with some 2+ decade old furniture-type stuff.
The Espressivo lamp from IKEA in the 90s-early 00s seemed very fitting, and is a bit of a classic. Mostly because everyone semingly had one, it nearly being banned, starting house fires and badly scalding children. All great things for a lamp.

With this in mind, and the fact that you can barely fucking get those 12V halogen bulbs any longer, I opted to LED convert it, using a generic G4 socket drop in replacement bulb. These are however meant to primarily run off the newer electronic high frequency drivers, which caused this one to give off a 50Hz noise, because this lamp uses a regular old transformer in its base. I fixed this by cutting the wires going to the bulb, and soldering a bridge rectifier and a capacitor in line, to feed the bulb DC instead. This fixed the problem completely, and it's now a really pretty nice desk lamp!

The LED bulb
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IMG_3890.JPG (166.98 KiB) Viewed 3950 times

In the base as it looks stock. the blue wires are heading up to the bulb
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IMG_3891.JPG (172.46 KiB) Viewed 3950 times

After installing the little rectifier and capacitor. Kinda hard to see..
IMG_3892.JPG
IMG_3892.JPG (157.76 KiB) Viewed 3950 times

And installed on the desk!
IMG_3893.JPG
IMG_3893.JPG (187.85 KiB) Viewed 3950 times
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