A Handy Lamp

A Handy Lamp is a robotic angle-poise desk lamp built to always point the light where your hands are working across a table or workbench.

To make this possible, inside are 5 servo motors mounted at each joint, along with a micro camera mounted inside the lightbox itself. The camera takes in a live feed of the workbench. This is fed into a barebones machine vision model to recognise hand shapes. From here, the controller program sends instructions to the motors inside each joint, for the lamp as a whole to move with the sole purpose of keeping these hands in the centre of the camera. Since the camera is mounted onto the lightbox, it ensures the LED’s are always illuminating the hands and whatever they are working on - handy right?

A consistent inconvenience I face every day working at my admittedly large desk is that my angle poise lamp always needs adjusting as I move around during the making process. An example of a common workflow I’d encounter is sketching something into a booklet - an exercise that needs focused light in the right direction so my hand doesn’t cast a shadow onto where I draw. Then moving to check on my 3D print as it progresses - requiring the lamp to be directed through the glass. Then moving up to find a specific tool or part box on the shelf rack above my desk - again requiring some intentional lamp poising.

Of course none of this can qualify as anything more than a minor inconvenience - I’ve lived with it for many months, but why settle? Part of the joy with this project is exploring what it means to not settle, despite the arguably inconsequential nature of the solution.