A message to parents: if you really want to make your children happy, you will design and build them their very own 3D printed nightlight and program an iPad app to go with it. That’s the big take away from designer Trent Brooks‘s project, published recently on adafruit. Using a variety of adafruit tech, some keen Blender skills, and Shapeways 3D printing, Brooks was able to make a one-of-a-kind nightlight for his 1.5 year old daughter, Harpa.
The project is a more advanced version of a small origami elephant with blinking LEDs that Brooks had originally made for her. Brooks designed the model for a wireframe elephant head in Blender and 3D printed it through Shapeways at 50cm wide x 50 cm high x 30cm deep (that’s about 1.6′ x 1.6′ x 1′) for $70. Naturally, 3D printing a head with filled surfaces would have cost an arm and a leg and the wireframe allowed Brooks to hand sew his own material onto the elephant head.
The internal workings of the elephant lamp involve an Arduino MEGA 2560 microcontroller with ethernet shield, which is connected to a 50cm long RGB LED strip with 30 LEDs, a microphone module, and an 8ohm speaker. The speaker is used mostly for playing white noise to lull Harpa to sleep, but the microphone is mostly for turning the head into a music visualizer, with the elephant changing colors with differences in sound. Total, the hardware was less than $100.
Finally, Brooks wrote an iPad app to teach Harpa about colors. With an interface that displays elephant heads of various colors, Harpa can pick one, the app will pronounce the color, and the night light will change to the corresponding hue. And, for the grown ups, the dad added a hidden control panel for changing the number of LEDs light up to allow for more advanced control of the lamp’s brightness and saturation and to create an automatic cross fade between the colors.
All combined, Harpa’s got one unique night light and one unique dad. I wouldn’t be surprised if people start knocking on their door to request one of each.
