Final Project

Concept

Inspired by my love of nature + cool lighting, I want to create a dynamic lamp that actively responds to room ambiance by creating a lighting scene inspired by one of nature's biomes or unique environments.

Previous Ideas + Progression

My original final project idea was to create a mechanized globe that could model the night sky given the date. The system would consist of a sun and moon controlled by servo motors, and a microcontroller that can be used for date selection. Once the date is selected, the sun and moon would move to reflect their real time positions on the globe. I thought would be interesting to play around with lighting systems such that the moon would always have the correct phase, and if the sun and moon happen to overlap, the user would see an eclipse. Other ideas I also entertained were portable coral reef nurseries or creating models of national park landscapes.

However, I grew kind of bored with the solar system idea because it was the first one I came up with. At some point throughout the semester, I came across shadow lamps. It incorporated the lighting aspects I would enjoy playing around with, gave me flexibility + creativity in the design, and would also be a functional furniture item I could use after the class.

How it works

I envison the lamp having 3 modes: Ambiance, Cycle, Selected In Ambiance, the lamp would be recording characteristics of the room such as temperature, humidity, and light levels. Depending on a combination of these recordings, it would light the corresponding lamp node that best matches the room. In Cycle, I would have each lamp node light up for a specified amount of time. In Selected, the user can select which lamp to light.

Lamp Design

Initially, I played around with the idea of potentially having nested shadow lamps that open like a flower, perhaps using servo motors. However, I finally decided to go with a tree-like shaped for the lamp base, and it would contain multiple lamp "nodes". Each node would have a design + LED color associated with a different environment. The current "environments" I'm planning on is: -Oceanic/Deep Sea -Rainforest -Arctic Tundra -Space/Starry Night -Desert I think the sea, desert, and tundra can share the same physical design, but have different light combinations. Therefore, there would only be 3 separate lamp nodes built.

Materials + Fabrication Methods

For the base, I'm considering either 3D printing a "trunk shape" (probably 1-2 feet long, perhaps in parametric pieces that fit together), and then attaching movable or adjustable arms that would support each lamp node.

While I had initially hoped to make the "branches" actuated (maybe using something like Flow.io), I think that's currently too far outside my scope given the time I have left. For the lamps, I was intially considering making them globe shaped. Because that would be hard to difficult manufacture, I decided to make the lamp nodes pyramidal-shaped or some other geometric configuration. This would give me flat faces so it would be easy to lasercut the designs, and they can be assembled with glue or epoxy.

Device selection: Input Sensors + Output LEDs

In terms of devices, I would need:

• Sensor
• Humidity Sensor
• Light Level Sensor
• Capacitive Touch
• LEDs

The BMP280 should be able to measure temperature and humidity. EDS has light level sensors and LEDs. I still need to research what sort of capacitive touch sensor I would need.