Dichroic Accent Reading Lamp:

For my midterm project, I created a table lamp for one of the phone booths. The lamp illuminates the table providing task lighting, similarly bright to the table lamp that was there before my lamp. The led strips are 12V bright white 5730 Leds, 72LED/M .5W/LED (similar to this product). The lamp has a dimmer switch to turn it on and increase / decrease the brightness. The top of the lamp includes a dichroic plexiglass accent. There is a channel for the light to pass behind the dichroic illuminating the material and creating a multicolored gradient from the point of view of the observer, as well as refracted colored light on the wall behind the lamp. I created all of the parts of the lamp on the CNC machine. Overall the piece came out much bigger than I imagined it, I should have cut it out of cardboard first. The lamp head was too heavy for the arm to support without bending so I added a laser cut clear acrylic support.

Assignment: Create an artificial candle or lantern using a NeoPixel jewel or other programmable LED. Your candle should include a base and a shade or diffuser. Try to capture the colors and behavior of a real candle in programming your candle.

For this assignment I created an acrylic “candle” made up of rings of acrylic with dichroic film on them arranged in the shape of a flame. I nested the flame portion inside a disc of dichroic which reflects the colors from the bottom of the candle. The reflected colors are greenish blue. The candle appears to have a yellow/red gradient from the side, a red to green gradient from the top, and a blue/green to red gradient when viewing the reflection of the candle.

The code I wrote tries to mimic a flame being ignited when the candle is turned on, after the ignition phase, there is a flicker, then the candle moves to its default state where there are minute changes while the program loops. Periodically a flicker occurs.

I sanded the insides of the rings perpendicular to the light source so the light travels vertically through the fixture. The tops of the rings are also sanded to diffuse the light filtered through the dichroic film. The outer edge of the bottom piece of acrylic is sanded so that the base catches light and illuminates.

The following pictures show the first attempt at the candle with regular acrylic unsanded, then sanded. Bottom pictures are lasered dichroic rings and the diffused sanded acrylic candle with dichroic.

Below are the pieces that were fabricated on the Othermill and a picture of the led candle next to it’s inspiration.

Arduino code available here