Moonbeam Lamp

Hi there, wonderful people!

It's slightly amusing that I set out to make a lamp, and it ended up looking like... a lamp!  

I had picked up an LED strip and enthusiastically set out to design some kind of lamp that used it, and initially that looked very different.  Imagine lampshades with helical LED strip channels inside.  From there things turned into something that looked more like a radiator with zigzagging LEDs, but at some point I wondered if an LED strip could be circled around the inside of a conical track, and thus have a more directional light.  

A few prototypes later there was conical LED caddy waiting to have a lamp built around it, and the rest came together in a flurry of bolts and struts!

Let's look at the bits involved!  

First and foremost, the LED strip caddy.  This is designed for evveryone's favourite self-adhesive low-power LED strip light - I'm using a USB-powered RGB one.  A useful thing about those strips is that they can generally be trimmed down to an arbitrary length.  

So, starting at the centre, the strip is stuck into the channel, and trimmed to fit at the top if necessary.  It requires a little less than a metre of LEDs, so if your strip is shorter than that you could instead start at the outside and work in.  You can't then trim it if it turns out to be too long, however!

With the power cable for the strip sticking out the bottom of the cone, the caddy fits into the main shade body, which similarly has a channel in the bottom for the power cable.  Then we add a screw-in diffuser to hold the caddy in place in the main shade body.

There are four different diffuser options: 

* a plain 0.2mm panel

* a 0.2mm panel with a spiral pattern

* a 0.2mm panel with hexagons

* an open ring that doesn't diffuse anything and just serves to hold things together instead.  

As you can imagine, the intention is that the diffuser is printed with 0.2mm layer height, at least for the first layer.

Holding the illuminating bit off the ground is the rest of the lamp - a base and a series of struts, held together with big bolts.  

The parts fit together on certain angles as dictated by the interlocking elements.  You'll need at least one "side" strut to connect the main shade body and the base, and I've used another pair of "side" and "central" struts in my print to make it look cooler.  You could of course have as many strut pieces as you like and keep adding pairs to add height and/or coolness.

There's one more bit to talk about - a cable chain to neatly guide the LED strip power cable from the main shade to the back of the base.  

The main shade body and the base have cable chain connectors, and you'll just need enough pieces to lead from one to the other based on how you have the lamp configured.  

These chain pieces print in an orientation that maximises strength when flexed slightly to connect them together.  The cable chain is pretty chunky, purely for style, so it can get in the way of certain angles, or require reconfiguration to sit on the other side of the bolt.

The cable chain is purely optional, though, and there are in fact versions of the main shade body and the base that don't include the cable chain mounts.

The base is actually hollow, with a lid underneath!  While you could use this as a secret hidey-hole it's really just intended as a place to add weight for stability if necessary.

One last photo for scale!  This is not a small print!

Print Description

All these parts are regular mode prints, including the diffusers.  

The diffusers should be printed with 0.2mm layer height, at least for the first layer, so that only a single layer is printed.

No supports are required for any of the parts.  There is a bit of bridging in some of the holes, but nothing crazy at all (and those bits are hidden behind bolts and struts anyway.

Infill is always a question - I wouldn't go too light, since bolts can generate a lot of force and you'll need to be cautious about that if you do minimise the infill! 

Print Dimensions

This is an assembly of large pieces!  The main shade body occupies 151mm x 151mm on the print bed and is 147mm tall.

Supports Needed?

Not at all!  Designed for straightforward printing!

Scalability

You could in theory scale this, but the tolerances for the threads will be affected, of course, and the fit of the LED strip will be questionable!

Print Orientation

The parts print as illustrated below:

File Location

You'll find this one at at 598 Moonbeam Lamp

Link to dropbox post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/31697592

Further Thoughts

The hardest part of developing this was dismissing all the other fun lamp ideas along the way!  Don't be surprised if another lamp appears sometime in the future :)

Happy printing!

xoxo

Sven.