…code, cg, electronics, projects…

One of the reasons I picked up the ‘natural’ (semi-transparent) PLA is to experiment with lighting designs.  In my head, I like the idea of printing out geometric shapes and seeing light filter out of them.  This print was my first attempt at creating a ’3d-printed lampshade’.  First, pictures:

Interesting things to note in the above pics:  The bottom left pic shows how support material is generated to help with printing ‘overhangs’.  The bottom middle picture shows me beginning to break out the infill material from the inside of the print.

Datapoints:

• Modeled in Autodesk Maya.  I wrote a Python script to help me auto-constrain polygonal platonic-solids to a hemispherical NURBS surface to get the overall shape.
• The inside diameter of the top hole is about 3.5cm :  This gives a nice friction-fit to the threaded light socket I picked up from Home Depot.
• This is the first time I’ve printed with support material.  Probably contributed to the 26 hour print time on my Makerbot Replicator.
• I had the printed plugged into my Kill A Watt:  It used 1.63 kWh of juice to print.
• I plugged a 40watt halogen bulb into it, and left it on to make sure it wouldn’t melt….  It did.  I came back in a few minutes later with the bulb completely melted to the print.  I was able to get the bulb out… and there’s no visible damage on the outside… but I’ll have to sand down the hole to get a new bulb in there.  In the future, I’ll either use a LED bulb (far less heat), or do a re-design to make the interior space… larger.

Overall it was a good first experiment into the world of lamp-shade design.   You can download the stl files over on Thingiverse.