Geodesic Dome Light

prusaprinters

<p>So, I felt like making a stupid lamp and that’s how it looks like. You could call it the coronavirus lamp or the minesweeper lamp or … whatever?</p><p>Let’s talk about this starting with geometrical structure: What I did use is a dodecahedron, which is a three-dimensional object made from 12 pentagons. All of these pentagons are identical and have equal side lengths.</p><p>When we subdivide each pentagon in 5 sections and extend their position from the center point of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodecahedron">dodecahedron</a> to a sphere, then three sections from adjacent pentagons can be merged to a single segment. The nice thing now is that all of these resulting 60 segments are identical. That’s pretty nifty, because now we just need make a single, small part 60 times and can assemble a full globe.</p><p>This is basically a model of one of the geodesic domes by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller">Bucky Fuller</a>, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly%27s_Eye_Dome">Fly’s Eye Dome</a>. It’s a geodesic dome with circular holes, made completely from segments, not from sticks and hubs like traditional geodesic domes.</p><p>It is clever to use a brim for the segments as they touch the buildplate only on a rather small area. Total printing time was about 96h hours. I got 30 low intensity lightbulbs from Ikea (socket type E14) and cheap standard light bulb fixtures from a noname brand. More info about the parts in the <a href="https://volzo.de/thing/geodesiclight/">blog post</a>.</p><p>Or you can learn a bit more in the video where I ramble about geodesic domes in general:&nbsp;</p><figure class="media"><oembed url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqaLTbHTYIw"></oembed></figure><p>&nbsp;</p>