Clement Lee ATCM 3355: Project 4 Makercase Lamp

 

Makercase Lamp: Jigsaw

Concept

I thought of the mathematical achievement recently (2023) found by Craig Kaplan et al.: the discovery of an infinite set of aperiodic monotiles. since the lamp has four sides, i decided to use both ends of the set, which do not force aperiodicity, namely the chevron piece and the six-figure, as well as the now-famed icon of the hat tile and the spectre tile, a weakly chiral aperiodic monotile. 

The gist of the paper is that Kaplan et al. found a tile that can tile the plane without having a repeating pattern. 

Process

I watched as many videos as I could on such subject, and skimmed the paper, but I could not understand how a tile arrangement like such was generated. What I do know is that all instances of the tiles that I will use can be made with increments of 30 degrees. I made each pattern manually, using the above animation as a reference. 

I used the makercase website, but I realized from the generated 3D model that the formation was not what I wanted, so I decided to just use the makercase model as inspiration to make my own template. 

Then, I used a curve attractor setup and used random curves as input, and the tiling as a set multiple input curves. A tiling is defined by shapes that fill a plane without gaps or overlaps. This implies that in no instance should any of the baked tiles remain its original size, as a tiling has duplicate edges everywhere. i had different ranges of sizes to rescale to, and lowered the range values for one side so that you can rotate the lamp to allow in less light. 

Materials

My friend James Malik helped me get quarter inch wood, and another friend Andrew Scott gave me a light cord. 

The North Lab was helpful in cutting it, and it cost me 15 minutes (16 dollars) to laser cut the wood. The technician respaced the figures so that it was closer together so that it wasted less wood and took less time. 

The wood was really easy to put together, and Andrew Scott gave me some loctite glue which cures within ~5 minutes, which was really quick. It felt deceptively simple, maybe I did something wrong but did not catch it. 

Conclusion

This is not my first time laser cutting, but I was surprised at my results nonetheless. If I were to make a lamp from my own terms, I would try to emulate a yosegi pattern (japanese parquetry shown below) on the side, next time I might play with the overall shape of the lantern.