Was just thinking about how one would retrofit an old Lava Lamp to use LEDs. The classic Lava Lamp uses incandescent bulbs as both the light source and a heat source to melt and animate the wax inside. So, an LED replacement would require not only the light source, but also a heat source.
CREE makes high power LEDS which certainly put off some heat, but you’d really need a separate heating element to melt the wax. If this element or elements were digitally controlled, they could be pulsed to perhaps create variations in the thermal currents inside the bulb to give some sort of control over the wax motion.
The other thing you would be able to do is put in RGB LEDs, or even black light LEDs, which would give you the ability change colors, and maybe run different colors at once illuminating different areas of the glass enclosure.
This unit could perhaps be retrofitted into any classic Lava Lamp base, if you just made it in a bulb format. Newer lamps could be made with a redesigned base.
Of course, as with all ideas of this type, the next step is to search to see what has been done in this area already. And sure enough, the Lava company has an LED Lava Lamp, It’s really disappointing, though. Runs on Batteries, it’s all plastic, and has molded plastic in the shape of the wax bloop. Boring. https://lavalamp.com/product/ledll/
They also have this, an LED mini-volcano, which is probably closer to what I’ve described, but not something that could be retrofitted on a classic Lava Lamp.
And, they have https://lavalamp.com/product/llmyol/, a do-it-yourself Lava Lamp kit with a color LED base, stuff to decorate the lamp base and top, and different kinds of glitter to put inside. This is actually pretty close to what I’m proposing, but it appears to use different material for the motion, basically two types of oil that don’t mix rather than the classic wax. I should get one, it looks kind of fun. It’s battery operated, and pretty low-temperature, so very well-suited for kids.
Yup, this is where my brain goes when there’s laundry to be folded, and stuff that should be going to Goodwill.