Good Day fellow photon wranglers!
I have been working on a few LED project for years and thought it might be time to share one or two of them. I’ve always found Polyhedra interesting, especially stellations or compounds of them. I have made many paper and card models over the years, but never a LED based model so I set out to make some. I’ve almost finished my Compound of Five Tetrahedrons (wikipedia page).
I started by knocking up a design in sketch-up (I know I know! - I have since taught myself FreeCAD but I started this project about 5 years ago) and making a cardboard net. I find it super useful to hold things in my hand when I’m thinking about how I’m going to progress. First Sketch-up model and Rough Card Model.
I then tested MANY! options for design and diffusion but ended up with a white basic PLA shell, and a PETG internal/shield. It is made into 3 pieces and a threaded bar through the centre which means I can disassemble into 3 pieces if I ever need to get inside again.I also added a reflective foil on the inside so that I can run the lights on lower power. I decided on a WS2812B type LED that was 12V supply so that I could run directly from a 3S Lipo. A Pixelblaze v3 Standard and sensor board is mounted close to the centre/origin of the piece and I have also crudely added some controls, buttons and sliders etc. Enough chatting here’s some pictures.
I mapped (manually by measuring in sketch-up) for each pixel deciding to use the centre point on the shield where each LED ‘hits’ rather than the led location itself and it seems to work well.
Mapped Demo with a few pre-built patterns.
Next steps is to learn how to design patterns myself (with hopefully a bit of help from the awesome folk here) and I need to mount it on a wooden staff with battery hidden inside. It will be a gift to a friend. Thank you for reading so far.
Woody
