While walking in my neighborhood, I found a section of 1 inch diameter wire. It had a thick layer of plastic insulation and then a 3/8 inch bundle of aluminum wires inside. I don't really have a reason to use this large size of wire, so what could I do with it besides just recycling it?
I was inspired to make a desk lamp that would take advantage of the structure of the wire. I used an old gearbox as the base. I used a piece of oak with three LEDs for the top. I added a single-pole double-throw center-off switch. It selects which current limiting resistor is used in the circuit. It uses a 100 ohm resistor for the high brightness, a 2500 ohm resistor for the low brightness, and a capacitor to smooth the transition between brightness levels. I haven't moved the capacitor inside the base yet. The thin positive wire is outside the insulation of the large wire.
Last night, I wanted to take a photo of the lamp in action. In order to take a photo, I set up a tripod outside (where it was completely dark) and turned off the flash on the Nikon camera. It chose the correct settings automatically- exposure time 4s. The daytime photo had exposure time 1/500s. Both had ISO speed 100 and f stop 4.5 in aperture priority mode.
No comments:
Post a Comment