Sunlamp/Moonlamp is a lamp and timekeeper. Made up of three interlocking, glowing orbs, the timepiece gradually changes color and intensity throughout the day and night, emphasizing our inner circadian sense of rhythm. The geometric design contains hidden references to the golden ratio and the five Platonic solids.

dimensions

5.75" x 5.75" x 5.75"

materials

3-D printed tough PLA; custom code & electronics

background

This project is a remix of a remix of a remix of a project I've been pursuing since childhood. My initial curiosity came from the surprising symmetries between the five Platonic solids (also known as regular polyhedra) and this construction of three interlocking golden rectangles. (A golden rectangle is a rectangle where the ratio of longest side to shortest side is Phi, the golden ratio.) The five Platonic solids have pairs — if you connect the center points the faces of a cube, you get an octahedron. If you do the same with a dodecahedron, you get an icosahedron. (The fifth regular polyhedron, the tetrahedron, is its own pair.) And even more surprisingly, there is a relationship between the golden ratio (a magical number often found in nature and in other recursive contexts) and the dodecahedron — the ratio of a regular pentagon's side to its diagonal is the golden ratio. For this reason, it turns out that you can perfectly inscribe the three interlocking golden rectangles construction inside of a dodecahedron/icosahedron pairing.

Previous versions of this project featured rectangles with hard edges, using material like acrylic or metal. For this remix I wanted something softer and more organic, so I created these 3-D modeled orbs with rounded edges and corners. Lit from embedded LEDs, the orbs take on a slightly supernatural glow. When thinking about time, I wanted to get away from the rigid "clock" time that has been a constant part of our lives since the industrial revolution, and return to a more natural sense of rhythm that a sundial provides — a sense of time that's less precise, but more accurate to the local conditions and seasons. We evolved to tell time from the sun, and this inner sense of time informs our bodies' natural rhythms. Sunlamp/Moonlamp ultimately serves to evoke and emphasize our circadian sense of time.

technical details

Sunlamp/Moonlamp runs off an embedded Arduino microcontroller to drive a strip of NeoPixel LEDs. The Arduino gets the current time via NTP, and fetches the local sunrise and sunset time via public API (based on the user-provided lat/long). Using that info, it calculates what portion of the day or night has already occurred, and generates the color and intensity levels for the LEDs accordingly. By day, it displays warm oranges and reds; by night, vibrant indigoes and violets. I roughly mapped each of the three glowing orbs to a metaphorical "second", "minute", and "hour" hand, using a base-12 system since 12 LEDs happened to fit well in the space allowed. The enclosure was designed in Tinkercad and 3-D printed in 8 separate segments, and then glued together once the electronic elements were embedded inside.