A week ago, I got a lamp called Midori from Artimide.
It came shipped amusingly flat…
… and with plenty of assembly to do, which is fun.
It folds out pretty impressively. So what’s the problem?
I have all my lamps plugged into wall sockets that are controlled remotely, so when I go to bed, I just push a button and all the lamps in the apt are switched off.
But this lamp doesn’t go on when the power returns — it remains stubbornly off until I physically hit the button on the cable.
Is this a new trend? I bought a lamp half a year ago that did the same, but that one was a dual battery/powered lamp, so it at least had a possible reason to not light up? Or are there new EU regulations that say that all lamps should remain off until they’ve been properly fondled by a human? (As a power savings thing. (They did enact similar laws for amplifiers, for instance — when not in use, they’re supposed to automatically go to stand by mode, so when you play some music, you have to fondle the amplifier, then wait for five seconds for it to boot without any indication whether it’s booting, and then not be sure whether you fondled it correctly, so you fondle it off, and then have to wait five seconds for it to switch itself off, and then re-fondle it and go away and cry in shame. (Most amplifiers do have a documented way to switch this shit off, mostly involving “hold these seven buttons down in the correct sequence for 1.75s, while twirling” or something similar.)))
Perhaps Artimide just wanted people to behold — behold! — how smoothly it switches itself on and off again. You can’t have a light go to 100% brightness immediately; you have to do a soft on/off, or it’s not luxed. (That’s a word.)
The innards of the power switch are surprisingly complex. My immediate thought was to just cut this thing off and replace it with a normal light switch… but… this is a 24V DC thing, and is it possible that it’s doing more logic for the actual LED chip in the lamp than just act as a So Soft So Luxurious On Off Button? I don’t know from LED, dude!
Let’s do my immediate thought, because I don’t have a second one.
I snipped it anyway! Hah! Living on the edge!
Shiny wire to shiny wire, black wire to black wire…
Done!
And… if you’ve seen the scroll bars on this blog, you know that it didn’t work.
What happens is that the LED comes on, and then goes off, then comes on, and then goes off and remains off. Whenever I turn the power on. So… er… there’s indeed some logic in the original power button that’s … doing something?
OH WELL I GUESS I JUST HAVE TO THROW THE LAMP AWAY
Or I could fiddle with it some further.
The actual lighting fixture in this lamp is this: It’s made by Artimide, and it’s bespoke for this lamp, apparently.
And indeed, the innards are extremely simple.
But is it all one integrated thing?
No! The important bit, the thing that holds the “bulb” in the lamp is this thing — it’s two magnets and a hole. And the dimensions look quite a lot like a normal bulb fixture thingiemabob!
So off to the stores again and buy more stuff.
Fiddle fiddle…
Done! It fits!
And to preserve the er artistic integrity of it all, I wanted to have the light appear in the lamp at a similar height, so I used one of these smaller bulbs instead of the normal larger ones.
*gasp*
IT WORKES! I think I got the height and lms pretty much right — it looks the same as before this operation.
So that was totally worth it. Two trips to the store, a day and a half of work, that’s going to save me tens and tens of seconds over the next decade.
The question remains: Why is Artimide so evil? SO EVIL