Our finished light:
We started ideating for a project by thinking about how we could make a basic lamp more visually interesting, thinking about how we could play with the scrap materials available to us at the Shop. Shiva was the one who came up with the idea for a lamp that resembled a flower, so we began sketching out ideas for the exterior of our lamp including how we wanted to encapsulate the wiring. After we had our plan set, the three of us split up work with Dan cutting, sanding down, and attaching the wood pieces together, Shiva designing and laser-cutting the acrylic petals, and me working through the circuitry and Arduino code in order to power our LED’s.
Original sketches for the shape of our lamp and the cone piece that Shiva was working on to attach the petals to the base.
Original Arduino setup with the toggle switch.
While working on my portion, I drew upon my work in a similar project I completed last semester that used potentiometers to control the RGB values of p5.js elements and a toggle switch to toggle between which elements the potentiometers would control. I found a lot of the wiring to be the same and thus the code wasn’t too hard to execute, but we ran into a major issue with the toggle switch not accurately reflecting a state change, even after it was changed to be so on the physical controllers. I found that it was in fact the physical toggle switch itself, that was causing the problem by utilizing the serial monitor to print out the digital read of the toggle state, and even after switching out the component with other toggle switches from the shop, I decided to replace the toggle switch that was originally supposed to control the on/off setting of the lamp with a potentiometer that would cause a state change after reaching the threshold of 500.
This is what our code ended up looking like after incorporating the second potentiometer:
We had our code and circuitry figured out fairly early into the process of constructing our lamp, and ran into the majority of our problems while trying to combine the physically designed components and our Arduino work.
Woodwork in the shop:
Acrylic laser cutting:
Soldering LEDs, potentiometers, and other components (this ended up taking wayyyy longer than we expected and all ended up having to contribute in order to finish the wiring).
