Strawberry lantern (ish)

It was a rather cold snap in the UK in early December 2022 and it seemed one of my strawberry plants hadn't gotten the message that it was winter yet and continued to flower for a while. That was the main inspiration for this lamp. I also really wanted something Voronoi, but that was easy to print, a lot of the models out there are not easy to print and require a LOT of support. The solution was to elongate a sphere and use that as a skin as well, that way, overhangs are concentrated at the point… which didn't really need support anyway.

I'd recommend using a 0.8mm nozzle for the big stuff so you can print everything in a couple of days. If you use a smaller nozzle, you could be looking at a couple of days per part.

I've only been 3D printing for a decade and changing nozzle size is a new novelty to me :D

From the standard 0.8mm nozzle, 0.4mm quality preset I just changed the infill to lightning - serious time and material saver - and upped the elephant foot compensation as the join between the base and the crown would be razor sharp otherwise.

The leg base has little recesses for 8mm rubber feet.

I used 0.4mm nozzle, 0.2 speed settings for the inner and pins parts. No magic here.

The vertical frame is designed to be stuck to a wall with 2 medium command strips on the top arms and 2 small ones on either side of the cable channel on the bottom arm. The frame will press fit a 6mm cable, anything grippy will work fine - cloth wrapped for my testing.

For the hardware, it's designed to be quite flexible. The shade hole is 40mm in diameter which seems pretty common. The inner bit allows for an e27 bulb to be inserted into the dome. The legs support a space of about 80mm so pretty much any lamp holder will fit. 

A 5w G45 golf ball bulb worked well. I was originally worried that the bulb will only light half the shade due to the way it is designed, but this was not the case. You probably don't want to use anything much more powerful as the heat may affect things more.

Assembly is quite straightforward. if you are going to hang the light, you can choose either of the bases or no base at all. Put a couple of the location pins through the crown so you can locate the base of choice. These should be a tight fit, but a drop of glue in the crown should be good. The inner can then be placed and the lamp holder is attached through the hole and secured as per your lamp holder guidelines. Screw in a bulb and screw on the outer.

The frame should be self-explanatory, but I could not find a way of getting the cable to route while the frame is on the wall… well without the need for supports or seriously offending my inner OCD.

There are a couple of remix options I was thinking about but can't get to for a while. The inner core could be replaced with some 5v addressable LEDs and controlled with something like WLED on a microcontroller.

To avoid the press fit cable clamp, a real cable clamp could be made that either makes the frame prettier or just grips the cable so it won't slide up through the foot on the wall.

These are the bulbs I used: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08Z6Z48M7

This is the cable I used: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B087BTRDDT