Winston Huo: Week 8 MakerCase Lamp

 

For my inspiration, I once again turned to something sound-related. As I have been looking into retro video game music, I decided to focus there. I took waveform readings of the three pitch-generating channels of the programmable sound generator of the Game Boy (and by extension the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance). The front of the lamp depicts a graphic of the Game Boy Color. I decided to have the left, back, and right represent channels one, two, and three, respectively and show examples of waveforms they are capable of generating. Channel one is a pulse wave channel with variable duty cycle and frequency sweep, channel two is a pulse wave channel with variable duty cycle, and channel three is a 4-bit programmable wavetable channel. For channel three, I decided to sample programmed waves from Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver to use as my waveform examples.

The actual drawing of my design was done in Adobe Illustrator using the template provided by MakerCase. That process mostly involved tracing a picture of the Game Boy Color and the waveforms readings that I obtained. Most of it transferred cleanly into Rhino although minor adjustments had to be made to make sure things were aligned properly. For the engraving file, I used the Hatch command to define the areas that needed to be raster cut. For the rendering file, I used ExtrudeCurve on my outer and inner cuts to make them into polysurfaces and BooleanDifference to make the actual cutouts in the panels. I also used ExtrudeCurve on my vector lines so that they would actually appear when imported into Keyshot. For the raster cuts, I used ExtrudeCurve on my raster cuts' outlines, then did a BooleanDifference with copies of the resulting polysurface to create a slight recess in the main panels with inlaid ploysurfaces that I could later apply a material to.

For the material assignments, I used an MDF material that I found as my plan with my physical product is to not paint it but only apply a lacquer. My initial plan was to paint it black, but it would make the vectors difficult, if not impossible to see. It would have to be traced with a fine, light colored pen of some sort which would be difficult for the channel three panel and somewhat defeats the purpose of having vector engravings in the first place. My environment was simple, it was a desk in a loft HDRI that I found as that would most definitely be where I would put this lamp. For the "lightbulb," I applied a point light to a sphere that I created inside the lamp.