Lithophane Bedside Light by NS_e

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

My first attempt of a lithophane project. My niece draws fantastic photo-realistic pictures in pencil, I thought a lithophane light would show off her work really well. But as I have just been experimenting with an Arduino starter kit it just had to be motorised.
The parts were designed using FreeCad, which is a free 3d cad program. For an exploded view of the light or to edit parts, load the FCStd files into FreeCad.
The shades were created on 3dp.rocks/lithophane. Positive image. Model, Maxsize 300mm, curve 360, vectors per pixel 5. Picture size needs to be 2.83 horizontal to each 1 vertical. i.e. 2150 x 760 pixels. This will then give the correct diameter to height when set at 300mm on Maxsize. Once the STL of the shade is obtained this is scaled up in the slicer by 140%, to give 150mm high & about 143mm diameter.
The stepper motor is a 28BY J48 as in many Arduino starter kits 5V driven through a ULN2003 Darlington driver. The LEDs are 12V white strips, I mounted 18 individual strips of 3, one strip of 3 in each segment of the light guides. Each one driven by through a ULN2003 channel as I was trying to make it so that the shade could be full height or 1/3 or 2/3 height. As 18 output channels were needed I had to use an Arduino mega.
The gear ring has 3 holes for magnets, these travel over a hall detector, this lines up the frames on the shade with the lights and tells the program what shade is fitted. The lens is printed in some pearl PLA which I had leftover it works very well as diffuser.
The Mk1 rotation didn’t work, so there are a few spacers included to move things up for the new gears, the back plate could be printed a little longer, instead of having the extension.https://youtu.be/A5WLvKnvdqg