Tubes1 by bbinnard

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

The idea for this design came from a photo I saw of a large geode. This prompted me to remember the Devil's Postpile national monument. Both of these are comprised of solid hexagonal extrusions placed at somewhat random positions. It occurred to me that this same concept might make an interesting looking LED light.
Tubes1 is my first attempt at this design. It's underlying shape is the top of a sphere, to which I added a bunch of randomly placed light pipes that are hollow (to let the light in and out the top.) I used 7 sided pipes because such a shape would never occur in nature. The lengths and diameters of the pipes are also randomly generated within specific limits.
This print took a little more than 31 hours to complete using a print speed of 90 mm/sec and a layer height of 0.200 mm. I used no internal supports, but I did specify variable layer height to help with the printing of the upper part of the sphere. For people not wanting to attempt such a large print I've got Tubes2 ready to print; it is about half the size of this one. I'm also considering arranging the pipes in a regular pattern on the spherical surface, so there might be even more of these in the future.
This lamp will accommodate any one of several LED lights called "puck" lights. You can get these powered by either batteries of wall power. This blog page has links for wall powered lights that work well:
http://birkbinnard.com/blog/wall-powered-led-lights/.
For many more options just Google "led puck lights."