MAT 238 Lamp Shade

A 3D-printed lamp shade.

This week's project is about designing a lamp shade in Grasshopper with any of the past approaches. I have a lamp in my apartment, as shown in the picture. It is super simple: basically it is a light bulb with a hollow half hemisphere on top of it. I am going to add some complexity to it by designing a better lamp shade. Part of the inspiration comes from the Statue of Liberty, as I recently saw a cute M&M version of it. It would be cool to make the whole design look like a torch. My goal is to design a lamp shade that somehow resemble it.

The lamp shade needs to be able to fit the existing light bulb. I used a ruler and a card to improvise since I did not have a caliper at home. Those measurements implied the size of the lamp shade.

I first followed the Numerical Representations of Surfaces to familiarize myself with numerical representations of surfaces as well as how to represent surfaces as a function. After some tweaks of the parameters, I was able to figure out how to modify which parameters to increase the complexity or frequency of the surfaces. Based on the code provided, I was able to generate surfaces shown in the pictures.

In the end, I was able to create a lotus like surface with the parametrization function shown in the picture. Then the output of the mesh data is processed by OffMesh to make offset and create solid. Msh2Psrf converts from the mesh data to a poly surface. Then I exported the file and sliced it on Cura.

I had a little problem printing it at first. The extrude filament had hard time attaching to the surface of the bed no matter how hard I tried to level the bed. After several failed trial, I chose raft in the build plate adhesion, which can be useful when the bottom surface of a model is not completely flat or has little adhesion to the build plate. Indeed, the model stick better to the build plate. I also printed a small version of it first to make sure everything goes well before I commit 18 hours to it.

While waiting for the print, I found a cool tutorial online and decided to try it out. Basically I use Loft to create a lofted surface through a set of section curves. Then I used Deconstruct Brep to deconstruct a brep into its constituent parts, namely surfaces, curves, and vertexes. Then I used List Item to retrieve the two deconstructed surfaces and divided them vertically into a certain number of subsurfaces using Divide Domain. Then I used Isotrim to extract every other surfaces to create a hollow shape. In the end, I was able to create the design shown in the figure.

After 18 hours of print, the lamp shade is finally ready. It fits well with the light bulb as well as the base.