My brother’s birthday was coming and I wanted to give him a present. I remembered how he mentioned that he always had wanted to learn how to weld. There is actually a funny story when he was a kid and told my dad that we wanted to learn how to weld and create big sculptures. The next day my dad gave him a soldering iron and wire, saying: “Go boy“. We are still not sure of my dad’s intentions, but it was definitely not what my brother desired, and he made it pretty obvious with his face, he still does it.
Anyway, I looked for some welding courses in Bogota, and I found a good 2X1 discount that ended up dragging me with him to this beautiful maker space in the city. Totally worth it, we worked on projects we liked and we share a good time, brainstorming, selecting materials, learning, failing, and welding.
Off course, I didn’t know what I wanted to make, but I was excited about working with such durable material, steal. I have worked making many interactive installations for museums, and branding activations. Most of these pieces have been made out of wood because of the ephemeral connotation of the project. Projects that live for 2 weekends up to 2 years, meaning, not permanent. Then I thought it was the perfect opportunity to create an installation that can live forever, being useful at the same time. I ended up choosing to make a Lamp.
First class we got an introduction to the tools and the material. It was refreshing to hear how the professor thinks metal is way much easier to work with than wood. According to him, you need fewer tools, it is more durable, and you can prototype much faster.
My brother decided to build a pull-up bar. I won’t share his process because I didn’t document it! Also, it is not an interactive piece.
Steal comes in 5 meters bars. I planned to have my project under that parameter to save some money. So I got the required material. This was the sketch I got in cm. I shrink the last rectangles to get less than 500 cm and then have enough material, but It didn’t get reflected in the image.
Once I got that I started cutting, all the pieces that I needed. This is a time consuming process, especially because I was noobie So this part took a couple of sessions. This was the result after a couple of weeks.
Off course, I wanted to test the light before everything got welded. LED strips also come 5 meters long so it was a perfect match, and since I was using the internal side of each rectangle to place the light, I was supposed to use less than 5m in LED strip
Initials lighting tests were successful and that was great to start welding and painting!
I decided to go with NodeMCU in order to have WIFI capabilities. Easy to use and pretty much the same as an Arduino. I also figured that a power supply of 5v and 2A was enough to light up the entire 5 meter LED strip at least at 20% the power which it was enough brightness. Also a pretty regular power supply, easy to get. Lightning tests also included diffuser material tests just to get the right brightness and light distribution.
Final results are.