Lolipop
Showcase
ITP/IMA Spring Show 2019
Tools
Arduino, NeoPixel, OpenWeatherMap
Role
Developer, Interaction Design
Brief
Lolipop is a smart floor lamp that serves as an ambient living room light, a clock, and a weather forecaster. It is a project co-created by me & Jasper Wang.
Concept
This project originates from an experiment we did to represent variances within a 24hr cycle through light. Inspired by the form of the tradional Chinese sun dial, and we designed a circular shape floor lamp that will provide an indication of the current hour and minutes, and change colors according to the weather forecast result in 4 hours.
Building Process
we made a ring structure that could house an LED strip from the inside, and attached it to a circular board. The board served as a reflective surface for the lights and to connect the wires to the supporting base.
We tested with several diffusion materials including clear/matted acrylics, fabrics, semi-transparent plastic sheet, and found that matted paper yielded the best results in terms of our desired light quality and lux level.
A second smaller ring was then made and aligned in the middle, concentrically to the larger ring on the board..
To control the LED lights for this fixture, four major libraries are used:
- The WiFiNINA library to get internet connection and query the live weather forecast data from OpenWeatherMap;
- The RTC zero library that pulls the time epochs from the internet;
- The ArduinoJSON library to parse the JSON weather forecast retrieved from the OpenWeatherMap;
- The ColorConverter library to adjust the color of the two rings based on the weather forecast.
Final Work
This project is shown on the ITP/IMA Spring Show 2019.
