I made a weird ceiling mounted light fixture.
The idea was to make something that had some movement that would allow it to either cast light downward through the bottom or outward from the sides.
It isn’t necessarily meant to illuminate a room but more so to be an interesting looking accent light. I just installed it above my coffee table in front of the TV so that I can use it as a nice glow of light and turn off the harsher room lights. It will either put a nice pool of light onto the table or give a bit of ambient glow to the room or somewhere in the middle.
To make the bottom opening mechanism I decided to make something similar to a camera lens aperture. The side panels I wanted to have fan out and have linked to the aperture mechanism so that they all move together in unison.
Materials used are laser cut 1/4" and 1/8" baltic birch plywood, Monocure Tuff resin for the aperture blades, 3DPC Value PLA for the majority of the FDM components, 3DPC TPU for the door grommets, Sakata PETG for the two diffusers and snap clips for the doors, and 16 608 bearings.
It consists of around 170 pieces with about 1.5-2kg of filament. It is completely fastener and adhesive free and took about 210 hours of print time with 2 printers running basically non stop for about 5 days plus 1.5 days on the resin printer. I probably spent about 30 hours designing it in Fusion 360. From starting in CAD to working prototype it was probably 10 days total.
If anybody is inexplicably curious about any details I can elaborate.
I half see this as a prototype mostly just because I had no idea if the mechanism was going to work before I built it. I had it all animated with joints in Fusion so I knew the concept was correct but I didn’t know if there was going to be an issue with friction or flex in materials until I built it. It is a lot of parts all sliding around to get the aperture opening to work and all things considered I think it’s acceptably smooth for something that doesn’t see a lot of cycles.
Now that I know it works if I made another version I would spend more time refining the aesthetic and the quality of light. I would also consider printing with wood filled or copper filled filament to get a different finish.