Introduction: Magic Wand and Lantern

Imagine living in a world where magic truly exists. With just the wave of a wand, you could move things around and light up rooms.

Our names are Sabrina and Sheryl, and through the power of engineering, we were able to create a wand operated lantern. When flicked, the completely 3D printed wand can both light up or turn off the laser cut lantern.

We made this wand and lantern for our Principles of Engineering class taught by Ms. Berbawy. Our inspiration came from an Instructable made by Elenavercher. We took the core idea of this Instructable and altered it to become our own project.

Supplies

Materials:

Tools:

  • 3D printer
  • Laser Cutter
  • Hot glue gun

Software:

  • Autodesk Fusion 360
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Procreate
  • Prusa Slicer
  • Microsoft MakeCode

Step 1: Create a Lantern Design

For our purple lantern, both the upper and lower designs were hand-drawn, while for our pink lantern, we found reference images online that were traced. Both designs were made on an iPad.

The first step in our design process was determining the dimensions of our lantern itself. Throughout our design process, we stayed organized by using an engineering notebook to log our progression and ideas. We decided for our lower section to be 120 x 140 mm and our upper section to be 80 x 90 mm. However, your lantern's dimensions can definitely be altered according to your preference!

For our pink lantern, we wanted the concept to be flowers and nature. Therefore, we decided on the upper section to have butterflies on tree branches and our lower section to have a hummingbird on flowers. All of our lantern designs were created on Procreate. Although your app choice for designing the lantern can vary, we highly recommend either Procreate or Adobe Illustrator for iPad.

When we were done creating our design, we made sure to fill in the uncut parts with black.

Step 2: Vector Your Design

After we finished drawing our design, we imported it onto Adobe Illustrator. In order for us to ready our design for laser cutting, we had to vector it. First, we hit "Image Trace," which is located on the relative top of the Illustrator screen.The "Image Trace" button was then replaced by a button called "Expand." Hitting this fully vectored our design.

After our design was fully vectored, we got rid of the background so only our design remained. We did this by double clicking the background and hitting backspace.

Since we did not dimension our design by our desired lantern dimensions, we had one more step. We created a rectangle with our desired dimensions (80 x 90 mm). This rectangle had no fill but a visible stroke. We then arranged our design so it completely fit over the rectangle. Then, we selected both our rectangle and design and clicked "Crop." Our design was now fully dimensioned and vectored!

Step 3: Adding Fingers and Cutting

In order to make our lantern sturdy we added fingers to our design. We used a website called MakerCase to do this. After downloading the MakerCase file as an SVG, we combined our butterfly design with the box design. The box design was already vectored, so there was no need to re-vector the fingers.

The laser cutter we used to create our lantern was the Universal Laser Systems VLS3.50DT. For this specific laser, we had to get rid of fill, change the stroke color to 255R 0G 0B, and the stroke size to 0.1 pt. However, this will vary based on the laser cutter being used, so check and make sure that your file is formatted correctly before cutting.

When we were done cutting our acrylic, we assembled our lantern and glued the top and bottom parts separately with acrylic cement. This was so we would still be able to open and close the lantern from the middle.

Step 4: Coding the Micro:bits

To code our micro:bits, we used Microsoft MakeCode as our software. We chose to do block code as our code did not need to be extremely complicated in order for it to work.

Here is the code for the micro:bits:

For the radio set group, we made sure no other micro:bits in our area were using that number. We downloaded the code onto both micro:bits.

Step 5: Wiring the Micro:bits

First, we broke open a 6V battery powered string of fairy lights and used alligator clips to attach the lights to one micro:bit. We connected P0 to the side of our fairy lights without the power switch and used the red clip to do this. Next, we connect GND to the side of our fairy lights with the power switch and used the black clip to do this. We placed the micro:bit and lights into our lantern. Our micro:bit looked something like this, but with fairy lights instead of an LED.

After putting the lights inside our lantern, we cut pieces of parchment paper that fit along our design and hot glued them onto the inside of our lantern. This simultaneously diffused the light in the lantern, hid our wires, and also made our lantern design more visible.


Step 6: CAD the Wand

We used Autodesk Fusion 360 as our CAD software to create our wand.

Bottom Section

First, we created a sketch of an organic shape. This is the shape we drew.

Then we constructed a plane 10 mm above the first sketch and pasted the same sketch onto the plane. After that, we rotated the sketch by 10 degrees and scaled it down by a factor of 0.05 (0.095). We repeated this step 10 times.

Things to keep in mind:

  • Every time we repeated this step, we rotated the sketch by 10 degrees and scaled the pasted sketch down by a factor of 0.05. For example, second sketch = rotate 10 degrees from first and scale by 0.095, third sketch = rotate 20 degrees and scale by 0.09, and so on
  • We slightly offset some layers to create a winding feeling

After this, we lofted all 10 sketches together and created a sketch on the very top layer of the design. We projected the top sketch (Profile 10) onto our new sketch. This was so we could create the top section of our wand. After projecting the design, we drew a square in the center and extruded it by -5.00 mm.

Top Section

We then created a new CAD file. Since Fusion 360 kept on crashing when we tried CADing the entire wand in one file. We split the wand into three different sections and assembled them all in a new file in the end.

First, we copied the last sketch from the top layer of the previous section onto the file. Once again, we constructed a plane 10 mm above the previous sketch, pasted the sketch, rotated it 10 degrees, and scaled it down by a factor of 0.05. We repeated this step until the wand was 350 mm in height, which took repeating the step 25 times.

Next, we lofted all the sketches together and extruded the square at the bottom of the body by 4.9 mm. We filleted the top of the wand. Lastly, we cut the wand in half vertically and joined the two halves together after they were 3D printed. This was so the wand would be able to 3D print more efficiently with fewer supports.

Base/Compartment

We built a rectangular compartment that extrudes off of the bottom of our wand to house the micro:bit.

First, on a new file, we created a 28 x 50 mm rectangle. We then extruded the rectangle by 66.5 mm. Lastly, we offset the top of the box by 1.5 mm.

The three sections of our wand were now complete.

Step 7: Assembling and Printing the Wand

To assemble the three wand sections on Fusion 360, we simply imported the three separate designs onto a new file. We joined the top and bottom parts of the three wand sections and aligned the base with the rest of the wand. While doing this, we turned the base so the opening was facing the side. We then lofted the base to the bottom of the wand and joined it to the wand body so the base and bottom sections were now attached. We also made sure to add chamfers to the edges of the base so our wand would not scratch anybody.

Printing

For the wand, we used Prusa Slicer as our slicing software.

We imported a 3MF version of the assembly file into our slicing software and laid each piece of the wand in the orientation in which supports were minimal.

Here are our print settings for a MK3 with Prusamint PLA:

Assembling the 3D Printed Pieces

After our wand was done printing, we sanded down the nub on the top of the wand so it wouldn't be too sharp. We then put the top section together and superglued the nub into the hole on the bottom section. Then, we superglued the bottom of the wand to the micro:bit compartment.

Then, we placed the second micro:bit into the wand compartment and made sure the micro:bit was facing right side up and on top of its battery.

Now when we flick our wand, it lights up our lantern, and when we shake the wand, the lights will turn off!

Step 8: Final Result

These are our two final lanterns and wands. Although this process went through many trials and errors, we had so much fun seeing this project come to life. To see a demonstration, click on the video above. We hope you have fun and enjoy your new project!