Lumi

Lumi is a packable light wand, meant to address the photographer's struggle when transporting large amounts of equipment for photoshoots. The design intends to minimize the volume occupied by lighting equipment commonly used in long-exposure photography. This is accomplished by stacking bistable origami structures called "Kresling Tubes" (seen in blue below) between panels housing LEDs (seen in gray below). Lumi is powered by a coin battery and has internal wiring soldered to each LED.

Lumi, the Packable Light Wand (Prototype)

Pictured above is a prototype made for the final presentation of the course. My team and I presented our design to professionals from industry as well as faculty of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech and it was a resounding success.

One issue we ran into with the prototype was that it was unable to "compress" as intended because I used a lower-gauge solid-core wire and the space inside the tube was limited by the space inside of the Kresling Tube. However, I took this issue as an opportunity to learn about different types of flexible wiring solutions that I could implement in future prototypes.

Lumi prototype in progress

For our presentation, we commissioned a photographer to take pictures of the prototype in action, which can be seen below.

My favorite picture from the photoshoot

This project was completed in collaboration with Denys Chernenko (BS CE), Janet Kim (BS BME), Samantha Weinberg (BS ID), Zixi Zhang (MS Eng Sci & Mech), and Ian Dath (BS CE) for our Origami Engineering course (CEE 4560). I was responsible for the organization of the team and files, for the prototype design, as well as several other supporting roles for other team members' tasks. Big thanks to my team for their contributions to this project!

Some more photoshoot images