TECH

3D Printed Wave Lamp Forecasts the Weather

While browsing Thingiverse, [Dushyant Ahuja] found a rather pleasing wave lamp, and since a mere lamp on its own would not quite be enough, he added a means by which his lamp could provide weather alerts by means of changing its color.
It’s fair to say that the wave lamp is not a print for the faint-hearted, and it took him 30 hours to complete. However, it has the interesting feature of not requiring a support or raft. There is also a base for the lamp designed to take a strip of addressable LEDs, and he modified its design to mount a small PCB containing an ESP8266 module and a level shifter chip. The code for the ESP relies on the OpenWeatherMap API, and changes the LED color based on the rainfall forecast.
Casting our minds back a decade, this lamp is reminiscent of the long-departed Nabaztag product, best described as an internet-connected plastic anthropomorphic rabbit that could keep you updated with information such as weather or stock market trends through lighting up and the movement of its ears. It was an overpriced idea tied into a proprietary online back end that was probably well before its time back in 2004. Perhaps repackaged for 2017 with a commodity microcontroller board Nabaztag has finally found its application.
There is a short video showing the color change and an LED animation, which we’ve put below the break.

Jenny List