My kids love minecraft.

We have a home Minecraft server setup that the kids play around with every day after school. The stuff they build in their world is way beyond anything I understand, but I love how they’re creating and learning together. It’s fun to watch how excited they get over the things they make - it feels kinda familiar.

The goal for my office has always been to bathe it in cool light. The old-school arcade atmosphere is very close to my heart, so I’m constantly adding to and tweaking the feel. Since arcades no longer exist, I want my kids to enjoy a similar environment when they visit my office.

This week’s project was to do something about the recessed can lighting that’s sprinkled throughout the ceiling. Now, there’s not a lot that can be done with recessed lighting to make it cool. They’re fairly “in your face” and directional, so coming up with a coolness upgrade was a challenge that had been floating around in the back of my head for quite some time.

In my previous Minecraft Ore post, I mentioned that building anything Minecraft-related was an easy task since everything is square-based. Thankfully, there are a lot of Minecraft things on Thingiverse to download and tweak. After finding a few interesting models, I scaled one of them up to fit around the light on the ceiling, tacked it up with a little double-sided tape, and programmed a Kasa RGB light to match the Tron Light colors.

I was worried about how this would turn out, but it actually looks really cool! As soon as my kids saw it, they begged me to do the same in their bedroom.

This is a “Shroomlight.” There’s also a “Froglight” and a “Sea Lantern” that will print as soon as more filament arrives.