This article actually contains rather a colorful collection of photos originated from the time before Nerdiy.de. At that time, I built a map of the world as a decoration for the then quite bare living room wall.
Unfortunately this is notan expect detailed step-by-step instruction here. Nevertheless, I believe that the information can be helpful in case someone decides to build this lamp.
Attention: If you are planning to recreate this lamp you should read the full article. I have made some (even stupid) mistakes, which made the construction unnecessarily difficult. If I were to build the lamp again, I (and certainly you also) would do something different. 🙂
Hints for our lovely english readers: Basically, many of the articles on Nerdiy.de are translations from the original german articles. Therefore, it may happen here and there that some illustrations are not available in english and that some translations are weird/strange/full of mistakes or generally totaly wrong. So if you find some obvious (or also not obvious) mistakes don't hesitate to leave us a hint about that in the comment section.
Also please don't get confused, that instead of a "dot" often a "comma" is used as decimal separator. 🙂
Inhalte
- 1 Safety instructions
- 2 Affiliate links / advertising links
- 3 Requirements
- 4 Collect the required parts
- 5 Let’s start the puzzle work
- 6 Transfer the contours to the wood surface
- 7 Fill gaps
- 8 Transfer contours
- 9 Sawing begins
- 10 Transfer positions of luminaires
- 11 Sanding for beautiful edges
- 12 Installation of LED lamps and strips
- 13 The control electronics
- 14 Schematics and firmware
- 15 Result
Safety instructions
I know the following hints are always a bit annoying and seem unnecessary. But unfortunately, many people who knew it "better" from carelessness lost their eyes, fingers or other things or hurt themselves. In comparison, a loss of data is almost not worth mentioning, but even these can be really annoying. Therefore, please take five minutes to read the safety instructions. Even the coolest project is worth no injury or other annoyance. https://www.nerdiy.de/en/sicherheitshinweise/
Affiliate links / advertising links
The links to online shops listed here are so-called affiliate links. If you click on such an affiliate link and shop via this link, Nerdiy.de receives a commission from the online shop or provider concerned. The price doesn't change for you. If you do your purchases via these links, you will support Nerdiy.de in being able to offer further useful projects in the future. 🙂
Requirements
Helpful Articles:
Before you start with this article you should have dealt with the basics of soldering. Information on this can be found in the following article.
Electronics – My friend the soldering iron
Required material:
In the following list you will find all the parts you need to implement this article.
Required tools:
In the following list you will find all the tools you need to implement this article.
Collect the required parts
I think that was the most elaborate part of the whole thing. Because in order to get the desired “patch” style I need all kind of wood in different sizes.

Let’s start the puzzle work
My former (as it should turn out stupid) plan at this time was now to screw all the individual slats into a large “wooden board”, then transfer the contours to this wooden board and then simply cut it out. So let’s start to puzzle.












Transfer the contours to the wood surface
To transfer the contours to the wooden plate, I had the plan to simply project a picture of a world map with a small projector on the wooden plate and then trace the contours. Unfortunately, this did not work directly. More infos to that in the course of the pictures…
1st attempt: projecting contours directly onto the wood:
Armed with laptop and projector, it goes to work.




This has worked out theoretically. Unfortunately, my (admittedly quite simple) projector had no zoom function. In other words, the resulting image section on the wood panel was much too small to be able to transfer the contours in the desired size to it.
Of course you could have removed the wooden plate further from the projector. That was all too impractical for me. That’s why I decided to go the following way.
2nd attempt: first transfer contours to wallpaper to create templates:
From the last move were still a few rolls of wallpaper left over. The new plan was now to transfer the desired contours to wallpaper, then cut out the resulting templates and thus transfer the contours to the wood panel.





Fill gaps
The first time the resulting originals were placed, it soon became apparent that the wooden plate screwed together was far too small. That’s why it had to be enlarged. Thats were the puzzle work started again.





Transfer contours
So now it was time to transfer the contours to the resulting wood panel.








Sawing begins
My plan (until then) was now simply to saw out the continents along the recorded contour. So far so good. If I had not built myself a few pitfalls (which you could already have seen coming).




























Transfer positions of luminaires
As a final rough work, the positions of the lamps on the stencils were transferred to the cut continents.



Sanding for beautiful edges
In order to beautify the rough saw edges and partly also the very rough wooden slats, everything was sanded down again with the delta sash and quite fine sandpaper. In addition, any existing pencil traces can be removed.











Installation of LED lamps and strips
After the woodwork, it was time for the electronics work. I wanted to install two different lights that could be controlled independently of each other. First, an indirect backlight. On the other hand, the built-in mini-bulbs should also be able to shine. It would be best, of course, if both were still dimmable. 🙂
In addition, I covered the “front” of the wooden slats/plates with copper tape to give it a more beautiful appearance.









The control electronics
With the control electronics (which can also be seen on the pictures) the miniature incandescent lamps as well as the indirect illumination in the form of the LED strips could each be dimmed with one potentiometer each. There was no on and off switch. To control the LEDs, they would be connected to the 12V supply voltage via a MOSFET. The MOSFETs were driven by a pulse width modulation from an Aruino Nano, which also took care of reading out the current values of the potentiometers. Meanwhile, this circuit is mostly replaced.
At least the potentiometers and the Arduino Nano have been replaced with a WEMOS D1-Mini including Tasmota firmware. I will still insert both schematics and also the firmware of the “Arduino Nano control electronics” here.
The electrical connection between the individual continents was made with four-wire NYM-K cable. Theoretically, three wires would have been enough, because two consumers can be switched if they share a ground wire, but this wire was just in stock. 🙂

Schematics and firmware
The circuit diagram for controlling the world map lamp does not have to do much. In principle, it is enough if you can control two outputs with it. You can achieve this with the circuit diagram shown below. In this way, the LED balls and indirect lighting can not only be switched on and off independently of one another, also their brightness is controlled easily.

It is important that if you want to use the Tasmota firmware to control your world map lamp, you have to set SetOption68 to 1. This is the only way to control both PWM channels independently of each other.
Result
After of more than 20 hours of construction, the time had come: the lamp was lit for the first time.






Before starting up, you should now follow the tips from the article Electronics – Commissioning a new circuit.
I hope everything worked as described. If not or you have any other questions or suggestions, please let me know in the comments. Also, ideas for new projects are always welcome. 🙂
Fab
P.S. Many of these projects - especially the hardware projects - cost a lot of time and money. Of course I do this because I enjoy it, but if you appreciate it that I share these information with you, I would be happy about a small donation to the coffee box. 🙂
