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There are many ways to enhance the entrance to a house, or to simply add a pleasing detail to a gazebo, a backyard deck or patio. In this video we create a working prototype of a solar lantern that could be used in many indoor or outdoor situations. With the solar light, this lantern can be placed outside to provide years of automatic on and off use as the re-purposed solar light will recharge the internal battery during the day and give about 6 hours of illumination to the lantern when the sun goes down.

There were some challenges to building this unit, specifically finding something that was opaque enough to hide seeing the light inside the lantern, but still bright enough to pass light and to "glow" in the dark and show off the detail. We tried many, many products and finally found a small quantity of rice paper that we were not entirely happy with, so this could use more experimentation.

All in all we loved the design and how the 3 dimensional aspect of the lantern was enhance with the projecting pieces on top. It was an easy build and we found all or the material were pieces that were left over from previous projects and the solar light was purchased as a used item from a local thrift store so it was a very economical build too.
Copyright - Colin Knecht
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