Aidan Feldman "That's a weird combination."

Miura-Ori Lamp

The first assignment in my Smart Surfaces class was to do some simple RGB color mixing using the Arduino, and to create a "lampshade" of sorts for display.  I had a piece of origami sitting on my desk from Creative Process last year (another very cool Provost-sponsored team-taught course), and imagined the way the highly faceted paper surface would dissipate and reflect light.

The form is a Miura-Ori fold, an origami pattern invented in 1970 by a Japanese astrophysicist.  The interesting feature of this pattern is that a surface with a large area can be completely unfolded by pulling in one direction, making its operation intuitive and mechanically simple.  One interesting application of the Miura-Ori fold has been on satellites, where instead of paper the surface is composed of solar cells, hinged along the would-be creases.  During launch, the solar arrays are relatively compact, but open during deployment to form a large planar surface area.  I enjoy their integration of an ancient art form, deeply rooted in traditional Japanese culture, into a high-tech system.

While considering the satellite's collection of light along the length of a solar panel array, I stuck three rows of colored LEDs on a breadboard, aligning with the "corners" of the folds.  Along each row, the LEDs slowly fade in and out in cannon, which I accomplished by expanding some Arduino tutorial code.  The vertical separation of colors (as seen in the picture) almost makes the lamp seem like a spectrograph or a prism.  Though there is not enough light projected for this to be a practical lamp, I was pleased with the visual effect of the light on the lampshade form.