Lutron Lighting Innovation Competition 2023

Content

Background

Have fun and make the light shine with your imagination!

Lutron Electronics, the College of Engineering Office of Career Development, and SILab will sponsor this event imagined by former SILab Advisor, Noah Abbott, who now works at Lutron.

Entrants will form teams of one to four, at least one must be a College of Engineering student. Each team must design and construct their coolest, most innovative lighting design project. Projects will be judged on: Creativity and Originality, Engineering Sophistication, and Aesthetic Appeal. Any combination of mechanical, electrical and computer engineering will prove useful toward these categories. Projects may (but need not) include complex mechanical design, circuitry, or microcontroller programming to produce a final project of these qualities. Requirements for amount of light produced, application of product, or overall purpose are intentionally left ambiguous to allow for a wide spectrum of resulting projects.

Key Dates

Kickoff Event: Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023, 5:30-6:30 pm, SILab

Workshop: Friday, Feb. 3, 2023, 4 pm, SILab

Presentations and Prizes: Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023, 12-2 pm, SILab

Design

Design Intent

This project started with a question: “What if we could see sounds?” Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. The project explores this idea by approximating chromesthesia – the association of sounds with color.

Mechanical

The main consideration in designing the housing for the lamp was to make it simple to fabricate and assemble. Both the base and shade are 3D-printable without the need for supports, and are sized to fit even on a smaller build plate like the 180mm square plate on my Prusa Mini+. The base has integrated cable passes to allow for clean wiring.

Ideally, the Arduino, breadboard, and microphone module would fit inside the base. However, due to size constraints from my printer, I could not do so.  Instead, the other components sit on a printed mounting plate to keep the design clean.

Electrical

The electrical design was fairly simple for this project. Both the sound sensor and NeoPixel ring require a 5V power input, so I used a breadboard to split the 5V supply and ground from the Arduino. The sound sensor is connected to an analog pin to read in voltage from the microphone, and the NeoPixel is connected to a digital pin for control.

Software

The main function of the control program is to translate the intensity of the ambient sound detected by the sound sensor and map it to an analogous brightness value for the LEDs. It additionally keeps a running average of recorded sounded intensity. If a value is significantly higher than the average, the Arduino also pushes a new color value to the LEDs, in a Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Violet cycle. 

The program can be found on my GitHub here.

Submission

Thoughts

Overall, I am satisfied with the quality of my submission to this competition. However, there is always room for improvement. A future iteration of this project would measure more than just sound intensity. The ability to measure the ambient sound spectrum would allow for a more specific mapping of colors to different frequency ranges. Additionally, the addressable nature of the NeoPixels would allow for individual ‘pixels’ to represent these ranges, allowing for a visualization similar to popular audio spectrum visualizers.