The Open Task Light build by Steven Bennett has reached a beautifully finished state, and it stands as one of the more satisfying hardware projects to follow from rough prototype to polished product. The whole thing grew from a simple ambition: Bennett saw a Dyson desk lamp that could slide up and down and in and out, balancing itself at every position, and decided to make his own version. The result is open-source, substantially cheaper than its inspiration, and documented in meticulous detail.
Hackaday covered the prototype back in 2023, and what has happened since then is a proper lesson in how iterative development ought to work. Bennett has produced a 15-part video series walking through the lamp’s evolution, tackling each aspect in turn: the mechanisms, the electronics, the production details. Watching each small decision accumulate into the finished object is genuinely instructive.
A Clean Design With Nowhere to Hide
The first thing that strikes you about the Open Task Light build is the restraint of it. There are a pair of extruded aluminium rails, a lamp head at one end, and some rollers in the middle. That is more or less all you see. The cleanliness is deliberate, and it hides a fair amount of engineering.
Run your eye along the rail and you will find a PCB running its full length, feeding power to the lamp head through pogo pins. No exposed wires, nothing trailing. Heat from the LED is handled by a heat pipe, again tucked inside the aluminium extrusion so it disappears entirely from view. For anyone who has wrestled with LED thermal management on a home build, that alone is worth noting.
The electronics are well chosen. An ESP32 handles control duties, talking to a dedicated LED driver that runs a Cree high-CRI LED. High colour-rendering index matters on a task light: you want to see what you are actually working on, not a washed-out approximation of it. Bennett has clearly thought about what the lamp is for, not just how it should look.
The Open Task Light Build: Base, Bearings, and BOM
The base is available in several variations, designed for either freestanding use or clamping to a table edge. It rides on bearings so it can rotate freely, matching the lamp’s movement across its other axes. The whole assembly can be positioned and repositioned without fighting it, which is exactly what you want from a task light used across a long working session.
Cost is always a conversation with a project like this. The bill of materials runs to more than 50 parts, and those add up. But the finished Open Task Light still comes in at well under half the price of the Dyson lamp that inspired it. For a design that replicates the core behaviour and adds open, modifiable hardware, that gap is considerable.
Bennett has published everything: the parts list, the design files, and a well-documented assembly guide, all available on his GitHub page. The open-source nature of the project means you can adapt the design, change the base configuration, swap components, or take it in an entirely different direction. That is the point. A commercial lamp gives you one fixed object; this gives you a starting point.
The Dyson lamp that started all this costs what it costs because of the engineering and finish behind it. Bennett’s Open Task Light build does not pretend otherwise. What it offers instead is a documented, reproducible, genuinely open piece of hardware that you can hold in your hands, understand completely, and call your own. The assembly guide is waiting for you on his GitHub whenever you are ready to start.
