CD Lamp with LEDs

Versión del blog en Español aquí

Throughout my life, I've been accumulating an important quantity of CDs and DVDs. Nowadays, with hard drives and pen drives all over the place, I barely use the round plastic things anymore. That's way I decided to get rid of all of them that I could find. It turns out I had a bunch and felt like a waste of money just to throw them away, so I decided to make a last useful thing with them. A LED-CD Lamp.

I'm not the first one to come up with this idea. I had seen many lamps over the internet, but I didn't want to get influenced for other people's designs, so I just started mine from scratch. (Any resemblance [except for the CDs, obviously] with other lamps is pure coincidence).

Again, my mistake is to get too excited with the project I'm working on, and I forget to make an exhaustive documentation of all the steps I took, but I'll do my best to explain things clearly with the few pictures I took.

I removed the old curtains of my apartment, and with them, the rods where they were hanging. Again, instead of just throwing them away, I decided to make something new with them, so I cut them in pieces of 50cm to give rigidity to the lamp structure.

Taking the dimensions of the rod into consideration, I designed the bottom and the top for my lamp.

Bottom part of the lamp

Top part of the lamp

The rod parts will go in the small holes surrounding the big hole for the CDs.

I did buy the RGB LED stripe, and cut two pieces of 50cm (the height of the lamp).

I say I cut two pieces because the whole stripe has a limitation in the angle it can bend without compromising the components, and I needed a 180º fold at the top of the lamp to be able to stick the two pieces of the stripe "back to back". I then soldered a small wire in every connection of one end of every stripe.

And now only was left to solder the cables of the same connection with each other. The +12V of one stripe with the +12V of the other stripe, blue with blue, red with red, and green with green. In the picture from above, I soldered a colored wire corresponding to the color of the connection, so it was just a matter of soldering the same colors together.

And finally, the set up was pretty easy:

1. Place the bottom printed part on the table.
2. Insert the rod pieces in the holes surrounding the CDs.
3. Put the CDs in the center of the bottom part.
4. Fit the two stripes through the CDs.
5. Close the structure with the top printed part.

And this is the result:

And a short video:

Upgrading my Prusa i2

Versión del blog en Español aquí

A short time ago, mu Prusa 2 had a setback where some of the parts broke in several pieces. Fortunately, I already knew this could happen and had an extra set of printed parts in case of something like this happened. I basically had to set up the printer from scratch, so I decided to make a good use of the opportunity and upgrade the printer to be able to use all the printing space. In the original design, the triangular frames are inside the Z motors, and it could happen that the X carriage with the extruder might collide with the frames. At the bottom of the printing space there's usually no problem because the bars are sufficiently separated from each other, but as the extruder goes up in the Z axis, the bars merge together, limiting the space in which the printer can move. This is why, instead of having a cubic printing space of 20x20x10 cm, what we have is a pyramidal printing space with a base of 20x20 cm and a height of 10 cm, and we don't want this. Here there are some examples of the motor colliding with one bar of the frame.

The solution was surprisingly easy. I just bought all the parallel bars to the X axis 50 cm in length, and this time I set up the motors for the Z axis inside the triangular frames. I also put two extra legs in the center of the structure to have more rigidity. This is the result:

 Obviously, by using longer bars, the size of the printer is increased, but the printing zone looks clearer and there's no risk of parts colliding with each other.