Market Day 2025 Laser Cut Night Light: Revisited

 

In March last year we were looking at developing the idea of combing the school laser cutter with a set of LED lights to create either a night light or some kind of illumination.     

This year as part of Market Day 2025 one of our groups was looking for an example of personalisation, that could be applied to a project, and we have already a group creating a version of Minecraft themed night light.   We applied the same basic principals to this design, the original of which you can see detailed here on this blog from March of last year.

As this is a prototype version of this print measures 100mm square and is 120mm high.    The current MDF is 6mm thick.    The light affect has been created by using a set of relatively inexpensive fairy lights, which means that the entire unit can be produced for under $5.

The next phase is of course to identify the personalisation of the unit and how that can occur.   The answer to this of course lies in the 3D Printing for the names.   It is conceivable that Sketchup might also be used to incorporate the design into the base of the unit.

The shapes (in this case circles) on the design causes the light to be diverted.  However the students have the obvious, could they locate additional colours (such as lights that change colour randomly) or movement that would affect the display.

In the past we have had groups focussed on light, using shapes to distort the light and using this theme for their projects - including a group who used the 3D Printers to print brackets to hold multi-coloured lights that cycled colours in 2019.

In July of 2024 we looked at producing a small sized light house that was completely created using the 3D Printers you can read that post here.