I Made a Lighting Thing
I decided to organize my office some… one day I’ll ‘finish’ it, but for now, I’ll consider it cleaner than it was…
After I moved a few things around, I realized that the shelf that I put my small lamp on was now missing – along with my current source of ambient, but not blinding, light.
After staring at the ceiling and the wall and trying to figure out what I could put in the old lamp’s place, preferably without putting any holes in the wall, I came upon a thought, I have a 3D Printer and I could print some fixtures that would hang on the wires of my (entirely too hot for use in the summer, but toasty in the winter) Halogen lighting. It would give me at least as much light as I was getting out of the little 15W fluorescent fixture I had on the desk and, even better, an excuse to design and print something…
First, measure and a sketch… After the initial design, I realized it was just a bit too wide to fit on the printer in one piece. I had to make my first modification – a symmetrical split in the center so I could print two bolt it together…
Perhaps later I’ll make a 5th version that snaps together without the bolt, but in this case, I just print two, flip one over and bolt them together. There isn’t a specific left/right print that has to be made, so I do like that aspect (and I have plenty of 10mm M3 bolts).
First Print, everything fit – mostly… the radius in the center was a bit large.
So I updated and made a few more revs and then had a final print…
Once I had the final design ready and they were printing, I worked to get the light fixture itself together.
For this I started with a ‘light sticks’ (for lack of a better word) that I had previously made to use on my camper in the fall – basically 1 Meter of 1 1/4” PVC pipe, cut in half length-wise and then I add in a strip of White LEDs down the middle – works great for camping or when I need some temporary 12v lighting.
For this, it wasn’t quite bright enough – so I added two more meters of LED strip I had around (3M total, about 1.2A draw @ 12V).
So, Finally we get this too-high contrast shot… it is pretty bright – a bit brighter than the Fluorescent fixture it replaced at a slightly higher current draw, but no flickering and slow turn on and warm up time…
