Antoine
Antoine
beautiful bedside lamp with a twist.
Overview
Antoine is collaborative project for Fabrication class at Global Innovation Exchange(GIX). Utilizing skills we learned earlier in the quarter, including hardware design & prototype, software development and circuit design, we developed a beautiful lamp that has strip and cloud LEDs, a motor and two Arduino modules. Linzi and I were each tasked with making a object that has unique standalone functionalities, and together the two object recognize each other, and produce a functionality together.
Linzi Xu(Left) & Yifan Liu
Team:
Linzi Xu & Yifan Liu
Description:
There are two component to this project, first component is a LED lamp. Individually, it would function as a bedside lamp, having a ring of light shining to the side. The second component is a rotating flower with cloud LEDs. Individually, it would light up and blink.
The flower device will connect to the top side of the lamp, together they will activate different functionalities on both components. The lamp’s colors would be activated, displaying colorful LED light show. The flower device will start rotating.
Process:
When we started our ideation process, we wanted to do a kinetic sculpture, an art form where rotating motion changes viewer’s perspective. Eventually, we decided that one of our objects will be a rotational sculpture, the other being the base.
First iteration of rotating sculpture
First iteration of LED base
Next step is figuring out what our sculpture would look like. We quickly build a couple cardboard prototypes using the laser cutter. Then we decided to place a few LEDs on each layer of the sculpture, so when it rotates the lights will add another dimension to the sculpture.
Rotating effect on our second iteration
Soon, we found out that constructing the sculpture with solid materials will make wiring the LEDs impossible. We then switched gears and decided to make a solid sculpture instead of a layered sculpture.
With the basic concept in mind, we move into the electronics. We decided to implement a Hall effect sensor and magnets to detect the connection of two objects. That left us needing an Arduino unit to connect to the sensor and provide electricity for the step motor and LEDs. We drew a circuit design and implemented it on breadboard.
Circuit for top module
After testing the sensors on a breadboard, we went ahead and designed a circular enclosure for the electronics.
With the constrain of voltage from the Arduino, and the power of our step motor(lack of power rather), we found out that our rotating sculpture cannot be too heavy. That came as a tough blow for us, because we spent a lot of time designing the sculpture in Rhino and already went through a few iterations.
Sculpture design in Rhino
We then changed out sculpture to a simple flower with stem.
Iterations of sculpture
For the base, we wanted it to serve as a modern-looking LED lamp when standalone. Therefore, we experimented with 3D printing in clear materials.
The Formlabs printers that we use has very high accuracy and resolution, but it takes quite a while to print, and the surface of the printed objects weren’t perfectly smooth because of the print support materials. It was taking us too long to iterate, and we decided against using this material.
Needing some sort of see through light guiding material, we went back to semi-transparent white acrylic and the laser cutter.
With that settled, we designed a circuit for the base, and moved on to creating the top and bottom panel of the base. We decided to put most of the electronics in the top panel, and designed detailed pathways for wires and components.
Circuit design for base
3D panel design in Fusion360
Using the Stratasys 3d printer, our panel came out quite well! After putting in and connecting all the electronic components, our base is coming together nicely!
At this point, just need to calibrate all the components and make sure they work well together.
Final product!!
System Block Diagram
Video
Reflection
Reflecting on the project, we definitely follow a zigzag course and spent a lot of time where it did not help us at the end. But did achieve what we wanted at the beginning: build a beautiful rotating sculpture siting on a LED base. Getting the sensors to work properly is the biggest challenge we faced. Neither of us have worked with touch sensor or Hall effect sensor, therefore we weren’t sure how much material we can put on top of the touch sensor, and how far can we put the magnet from the Hall effect sensor. We did learn to model in Fusion360, and became expert in creating object for 3D printing. Overall, it was a good exercise for us, utilizing different sensors and prototyping using 3D printers.