Smart Lamp That Automatically Illuminates Your Workspace

Hi, welcome to our new instructable, we are Fermin López Suarez, Constantino Gomez Sanchez and Valentin Ramieri, three students of the Escuela Técnica Roberto Rocca, from Campana in Buenos Aires, Argentina, we are between 14 and 15 years old. Our motivation is the idea of integrating 3 subjects such as English, technological languages and technological systems in a technical project related to what we have been working through this year. 

Our project is a lamp controlled by Arduino that automatically illuminates the workspace, with sensors and a manual light intensity regulation. Its use is to detect the place where you are working and illuminate it. The technical knowledge to take into account when you are making this project are circuits assembly with Arduino, programming, 3D modelling and technical sketches. 

• Corrugated cardboard | Material
• Arduino UNO | Electronic
• 8 Segment neopixels | Electronic
• 5 LEDs | Electronic
• 1 Potentiometer | Electronic
• Jumper wires | Electronic
• 1 Breadboard | Electronic
• Ultrasonic ranging module | Electronic
• Micro servomotor | Electronic
• Computer with Fusion 360 or other modeling software

We started our project by searching information about the electronic components (Datasheets) and posible design ideas to use.

Here you have all the datasheets we used for the design of our project:

After the information research you are going to make some sketches, aiming to survey and record all components, subassemblies and linkages of your product.

In other words you will use this step to have a reference of the project proportions and the way the components are linked.

For the simulation we made the arrengments beetwen the components and the protoboard 

You can look at them at this Tinkercad document

In this step we are going to make 2D drawings of the non-electronic components registered on the previous step with dimensions and geometries, always taking into account the proportions and the IRAM standards. If you want you can also make rapid prototypes to verify the linkage of the components.

Here you heve the IRAM standards for technical drawing we used for the whole project:

We chose to use C++ programming because it's the default programming of Arduino and Tinkercad. About this, We didn’t really consider the softwares to use, we used the ones we had already known. Anyways it would have been interesting trying something new, but we had not enough time to learn a new one. We started with both, the light system, the sensors and servomotor, each one in different Tinkercad documents to work faster. For the servomotors movement we started by a conditional block, then we added a comparison between the distance read by the sensor and 20 centimetres, which is the approximate start of the effective part of the range from this type of sensor, if this condition is true, the servomotor would move. Then we made the light part in written code, so we could use the map function, which makes a proportional increase between the potenciometer and the brightness of the LEDs. 

Here you have the code to download:

For the 3D modeling we chose to use Fusion 360 because it is the one that has more features of the ones we know, if you have another preferences or you just don't know how to use it you can make it with the software you want. This step is very simple, you just have to use the sketches of the steps 2 and 4 to create 3D modelings of each components of the product and its assembly

On this step you are going to bring the circuit you have done previous to life, you also have to make the anchorage on the shell from the sketches step, in our case we needed more protoboards than just one as it was on the Tinkercad document, so have that in mind when making your circuit assembly.

On this step you are going to make manufacturing plans of each component using the models and softwares that have been used in the 3D modeling step, according to the IRAM standards.

In this step we made a functional prototype made out of cardboard which could verify that the final product would work, we made this using the manufacturing plans made in the previous step.

About this step maybe cardboard wasn't the best material, so we are planning to re-make this prototype with a better material.

After the functional prototype we realised that we needed to do some changes to the base of the lamp because the sensors range would overlap each other and this could cause malfunctions, also we realised that the Arduino UNO wouldn't be able to enter inside the base, so we changed both, the design and the dimensions.

We also had to get out one of the leds because it couldn't work with the first pin.

Here you have the final version of the code and the base:

Well, we have reached the end of the project, maybe at a first moment we thought that the schedule was a little bit fast (1 week for each deliverable) and our results weren't as good as they could be, but now we can say that we made a lamp which we are proud of.