3/12/2023

I found this little kid’s lantern for a literal dollar at the thrift store. A fun fact about me is I like to break things open to see how they work inside before I throw them in the trash. Another one is that I cannot resist things that are just a dollar.

it even had batteries

even if it didn’t have batteries, I would have a bought it to just open it up and look inside. In this case I was able to test it first. Opening it up revealed that all it really is, is a button amd a small circuit board with two LEDs on it.

3 batteries gives plenty of voltage, the button is really nice and firm, and the white LED seems fairly high quality.

I knew I had to print my own topper for it now and I thought a UFO with a tractor beam type thing would be simple and easy. I first modeled the base where my thing would need to snap onto.

Then I kind of just doodled a cool looking beam. After that, I used an equation driven spline to make a neat wave shape. Then I copied the wave into a V, and revolved that into saucer.

I printed the beam with a 0.6mm nozzle, and used vase mode. Vase mode makes it so the print is one single, slow, very smooth shell. This makes it look smooth and keeps it thin enough for the light to make it glow.

First I tried to print the saucer as one piece with supports but it wasn’t going well and I realized it was too easy to print in halves and glue together.

since I’ve been playing with the spline generator and printing them as torture tests for my printer, I figured it would be neat to put one into the beam to cast a shadow on it.