Small Lamps

I use a piece of paracord (without the core) to hang the small lamps from the main lamp. 9 LEDs (7.5 cm of 120 LED/m strip) emit light and need about 65 mA at 12 V. This can be supplied by 0.35 mm magnet wire without problem. However, they are so lightweight that even the magnet wire won't be straight so I need to add a stiffener to the hollow paracord. For a first test, I used a toothpick as stiffener.

Assembly starts with a small tapered 3d printed part glued to the stiffener:

This part and the magnet wires are inserted into the paracord, and into the shade's centerpiece:

The LEDs are stuck to a ring which is glued to the centerpiece. Here's the whole thing assembled:

Now we can clip on a little "dress" from below, so the little lamps can be re-dressed as desired:

I might print the parts again in transparent filament to have some light exit through the top.

Now the stiffener straightens the paracord, but ends somewhere along the way because the upper part of the paracord needs to bend around a disk rotated by a servo. That's how I can make the lamps move vertically without any sideways movement:

Since the print is so glossy, here's a view from OpenSCAD:

The rectangular pockets can be used to clamp the paracord to the wheel with a piece of perfboard and two M2 screws.

The servos are driven by a Teensy 3.2 which uses the PulsePosition library to generate PPM that is fed into a shift register (one shift reg for 8 servos). I need 12 small lamps, so two of these boards:

The Teensy will receive commands from an ESP-01 over serial. The ESP will receive over MQTT from a server which is running on a local RPi anyway. More on that later.

I'm currently trying to figure out which kind of stiffener I want to use that is easy to use, more or less straight, and cheap.