building the inner-housing (Charlotte and Kendall)

Once we had the essentials of our lamp functioning (coding, wiring, LEDS, sensor), we needed to figure out how to house these objects inside of the lamp that we bought. We sketched out a few ideas, and discussed possible materials and ways to construct this housing. In the end, we decided to laser-cut a sheet of acrylic to create our housing. This was the first time either of us had used the laser-cutter so it was a new experience for both of us. We used illustrator to create correctly-scaled templates, which we then put into Rhino to send to the laser-cutter. It was exciting watching the laser printer cut out the pieces, even though we had to make adjustments to our first attempt. We assembled the pieces, sanded down the acrylic, and spray-painted the housing to give it a clean look that matched the aesthetic quality of our lamp. Our housing had a hole at the top, to allow for the sensor to easily detect the color of an object. Using the laser-cutter and constructing part of our lamp ourselves, was an exciting hands-on experience.