Making the Destiny 2 Ghost into a Lamp (2023)

Software: SolidWorks
Techniques: 3D Printing/Post-Processing, Fab/Assembly, Touching Spicy Mains

I Have Not Played Destiny 2

But my partner has! So here we are, blasphemizing:

Destiny 2 is a videogame where you wrestle with deep questions about humanity and morality, but the real game is making sure that you and your tiny robot follower have the nicest outfits possible. I thought it would be fun to make a a functional desk lamp shaped like the Ghost (pictured right).

And, for once, I started this project with a lot of time to spare, so I had plenty of runway to scope-creep myself. Features I wanted to maintain:

  • The lamp should be bright enough to be a reading lamp (ideally brighter, or togglable)

  • The lamp should have blue mode (for the eye) and also a neutral white/yellow mode for not giving people migraines

  • The lamp should have swappable shells—in-game, the Ghost is the core sphere, and you can dress it up with funny little hats. The “generalist” shell is shown top right, while an alternate shell shaped like a cute lil’ ladybug is shown bottom right.

  • The “generalist” shell should spin as demonstrated in the top right image. This is not at all necessary for being a functional desk lamp, but I find it adorable and as such am willing to put in a lot of extra work to produce this feature.

Pre-Design

I gave myself two major concessions for this project:

  • The lamp base & gooseneck was salvaged (from Goodwill). There’s a world in which I would design the mechanical bits from scratch so that I’m not reliant on finding the perfect lamp in the bargain bin. But in this world, I bought a broken lamp for $3.98, stripped out all the parts I didn’t need, and saved a ton of effort and time that I promptly put elsewhere. The lamp body is built to receive threads for a 5/16”-18 thread, which appears to be pretty standard for lighting gooseneck, so I’m not too concerned if I need to remake/replace anything (the base isn’t the core of the design, after all).

  • The light functionalities above were handled by a fancy prebuilt light bulb. I kept the socket size standard (E26) so that long term the project isn’t entirely reliant on this part. There’s definitely a cool world in which I handle this on custom Arduino stuff in the base, but I wanted this to function as a normal lamp, which means 120VAC intake, and I wasn’t up for handling spicy relay boards for a quick project. I still needed to strip out the lamp’s original wiring and crimp on the new socket, so it felt a little less like cheating.

Design

The feature tree for this part is one of the most holistic things I’ve done in SolidWorks, honestly. There’s some pretty interesting surfacing/point cloud modelling necessary to set up the Generalist shell, the ladybug shell requires some funky booleans, and the core Ghost—well, that one’s mostly just a sphere, but I did indulge in making swappable eye-lenses that use a camera lens-style bayonet fitting.

To allow for swappable shells, each element of the shell has internal magnets, which locate off of the little nubs in the Ghost’s body (this kind of appears to be how it’s done in canon? though they get a lot more magic). The Generalist shell has 8 pieces, as it made sense to keep each fin separate. The ladybug shell has two halves that lock around an extra eye ring—it probably could’ve been just two halves, but the official model doesn’t have any split lines around the eye and I’m committed to way too much to back down now.

Assembly

I was pretty judicious in using prototypes during the CAD process of this. I flat-patterned the initial Generalist shell’s fins to make a paper version first—a lot of things can look different on the computer screen vs in the real world, and I didn’t want to commit to printing the entire shell without doing a fitcheck.

From there, it’s some pretty standard 3D print post-processing, sanding, priming, painting. I had a bit of fun weathering the pieces—I liked the idea that the shells are new and pristine, but the Ghost’s actual body is kind of beat up after all the shenanigans you get up to in-game.