Duncan Wither

Ping Pong Light 0 - Intro

Written: 20-Aug-2021

This project is about making a lamp that used ping pong balls as diffusers. Safe to say it was fairly over engineered in all the worst ways. The final result is shown below:

List of PPL Posts

This post is the first in a short series, and aims to give some of the background. The other posts can be found below:

1. Mechanical Design
2. Electrical Design
3. Software Build
4. Integration + Completion

Why

I built this lamp for a number of reasons:

• I needed¹ a lamp.
  • Or at least I did when I started this project.
• Education:
  • Primarily in integration and the actuality of building a prototype
• Something nice for interviews:
  • Again primarily as something to talk about when looking at completing projects / the last hurdle for electronics development.
  • Also to give me confidence when talking about developing code on microcontrollers

The original timeline was hopefully a month, but things took longer than they should’ve done², and I moved house 1.5³ times along with moving job. Safe to say it took about ~1000% longer than expected.

Next Step…

Mechanical Design