Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Capacitive touch lamp: progress



The last few days I've been finding time to work on my new capacitive touch lamp design. It's been so great to work at a faster pace on something!  This design process has been much faster and more intuitive than other projects currently in progress, as I've already made a rough prototype and am really just tidying things up.



The new design features a 3D printed "core" - a plastic chassis that houses the circuit and LED strip, while serving to reinforce the walls of the lamp from the inside.


The series will be constructed of bamboo (in honor of the trip China trip this project is raising money for!) but while I waited for materials to arrive in the mail from inventables.com, I created a mockup with some spare cast acrylic I had left over from a past project.



These lamps will also feature a number of changeable "face plates" - laser-etched images to be illuminated by the LED series.  The grumpy cat pictured above is just a test graphic - I havent quite settled on what the final plates will look like.


The bamboo plywood sheets actually arrived earlier today.  Between prepping for tomorrow's classes, I managed to put together a quick test model:


I'm quite happy with how this new design goes together, but there is still much to tweak.  Soon enough I'll be ready to start programming some colorful led action!

No comments:

Post a Comment