MAT 238_COMPFAB_Week3

Weekly Assignment: Create a shade for an existing lamp or light fixture in your home.

3D printing: Ender 3 Pro, Standard White PLA, UV Reactive (Blue) PLA

Design: Rhino, Grasshopper

Before starting to design the lampshade, I need to find how I'm going to attach my 3D printed object to the existing lamp. The selected lamp has a solid curve metallic cover that I was not able to remove. So, I had to figure out a way to fit the design and also what kind of extra parts I would need to print to make it fit. At firs,t I was thinking to make a design that fits perfectly and then cutting it in half and printing the whole lampshade in two big parts. After some tests, I saw that it was not possible... The printing was taking too long and I would need to glue the parts together.

After several ideas, I decided to create a two-piece, covering the upper part of the curve, and then the surface will come and secure it. A press-fit design that can adapt perfectly to the curve of the light and can be easily removed and fit another design of the lampshade. The design was also efficient in terms of printing. You would need to print it once for each lamp.

For the parametric design of the lamp, the original idea was about geometry and flowers because the design of the lampshade looks like a flower stem. I modified some parameters from the provided python module inside Grasshopper to get more "waves" over the X,Y,Z axis and also a more "broken" symmetry. While trying to figure out the final shape, I had to export several versions and slice them in Cura in other to figure out which out was more efficient and would have a better result. I started with not so many subdivisions, but eventually, they were more or less the same time for each lamp.

The slicing was a big part of this project, trying to figure out which mode and settings could be better for each design. The first image is the slicing with the special mode at Cura seemed faster, but there were many problems and gaps appearing in the areas with support and on the base of the printing. In the second image, the printing time was long, but the output result would be more robust and smooth. I choose to go along with the second version of slicing, printing the lampshade overnight.

Almost 10 hours of printing but it was totally worth it! The first test print was with the basic white PLA but the final implementation was with the blue UV reactive PLA. The lampshade is white by night and blue by day!