This hanging mood lamp (mood chandelier?) uses an array of 10 neopixel LEDs to create lighting moods - stuff like alpine dawn, Caribbean sunset, or rainforest showers. Since the optical properties of these contexts are known, our fine-grained control over the LED’s allows us (my friend Tim and I) to precisely recreate them. In addition, the LEDs - 10 rings equals 160 point-sources in all - can emit blue wavelengths, the part of the light spectrum that counteracts the winter blues.
Our color schemes breathe in and out, almost imperceptibly, according to mood selection. In the ideal scenario, they’d be controlled via app, and could do double duty as an “alarm clock”. But this is more proof of concept than final project, so we hard-coded the lighting settings.
The cardboard superstructure is a variation on an origami pattern known as the Miuri-ori. I inscribed it via laser cutter with a geometric motif borrowed from the Topkapi Scrolls. The origami folds, frustratingly, did not want to hold the desired shape (a gently swooping arc) so I 3D-printed brackets that were then glued to vertices atop the lamp. The brackets, along with gravity, did the trick.
This project took a ridiculous amount of time. (Thankfully, on the budget side, it came in under $150). Rather than refine it, Tim and I are making a second iteration with a radically different form factor - think table lamp - but similar functionality.