Electric lighting – is there anything it can’t do? Coming in all manner of forms and flavours, you can get everything from a compact reading lamp to a blindingly powerful worklight for your garage. Generally, different lights are built in different ways to suit their purpose, but it’s not the only way to do things. Enter [slisgrinder] and the MOSAIC Lighting System.
At its heart, MOSAIC is a way of building lighting rigs out of individual modules. Where it gets interesting is the design – they’re triangles! The boards carry a variety of LEDs and are laid out in a fashion that allows the power and data connections to be made between adjacent cells by laying them out next to each other. Many boards can be tesselated together to create larger, smaller, or unusually shaped arrays. The connections are well thought out, allowing the tiles to make a connection along any one of their 3 edges, regardless of orientation.
The project began out of a desire to grow okra in an otherwise inhospitable climate; to this end, there are both general work lighting modules as well as grow light versions with UV LEDs on board. The modules can be combined in different ways and command and control is done over RS-485.
It’s a tidy project that shows how a little thought can create a versatile design through the use of an unusual form factor. We’ve seen modular lighting projects before, too – like this entry to last year’s Hackaday Prize.
LEGO Lights. :-D
“Electric lighting – is there anything it can’t do? Coming in all manner of forms and flavours, you can get everything from a compact reading lamp to a blindingly powerful worklight for your garage. ”
Leds have been a revolution in lighting, not just in function, and efficiency, but asthetics as well. Going places it was difficult before.
This is a beautiful design but, was it really inspired by the desire to grow Okra? Who the heck wants to grow Okra?
Whispering
(It’s a code word for you know what!)
B^)
Ah, got it…say no more. (wink)
You can tell that this stoner was inspired by a Doritos chip.
In all seriousness though, it’s legit okra. It’s not a code word for anything else.
Tsk. Go to your kitchen and think about what you’ve done. :(
I’ll make some okra curry while I think about what I’ve done in the kitchen ;)
It looks more equilaterally-triangulated than tessellated, neh? Seriously, I think it is only tessellated if laid out in a tessellation, and not related to the shape.
It’s tessellated in the sense that they are identical functional units that can be placed together without gaps to make a larger surface.
Needs some other shapes so they can be arranged into a soccer ball style sphere.
Then needs to replace the LED with solar cells.
Then bigify.
Then wrap around the sun.
Modular Dyson sphere!!!
What, icosahedron not good enough for ya?
Not if you’re building a really cool soccer ball!
B^)
Reminds me of the Nanoleaf Aurora.
Huh… Didn’t know that existed. Good to know…
Yea, i was just looking at that picture and thought, hey, that’s almost the same as my ambient light in the living room…
Hi! Would it be possible to use ‘zebra connectors’ for the io? Saves the soldering, and eases re-arranging.
That is an interesting idea. However I am not sure about using them for power delivery.