What do you do when you find out that one of the main pieces you were planning on displaying at a large STEM conference won't be available?.....
...you make an overly-ambitious plan to design, produce, fabricate, wire, and code a large infinity dodecahedron (inspired by Neil Merchant's "Carl"). A journey that relied on everything working correctly (it didn't) and things being delivered on time (they weren't).
This is Neil Merchant's "Carl"
The design started fairly straight forward, we want to make something fairly significant in size, but also portable so settled on a dodecahedron of about 50cm in diameter. We wanted to find the right balance between chunky sides and moving LED strips further outward (to be able to diffuse the light, if desired) but ultimately settled on only about 5 mm offset from faces of LEDs to the mirror surface.
Here you can see the mirror planes (green), the frame structure (pink), led strip (red), and cover (blue).
With the model completed (and rendered just for fun), it was off to the 3D printer for production, the acrylic mirror shapes were ordered as well.
We only ordered the main pieces for printing because we needed to test fit the covers and legs for proper fitment, but since the turnaround time is about 3 days we still had time to that. The factory sent us a photo of the print completed and arranged a courier to deliver it to us
All was going well, and we still had about 3 days to complete everything…or so we thought.
About an hour into the delivery window we get a frantic phone call from the courier letting us know that he lost the package….yes, lost it….lost a huge box that was on the back of his scooter…the only package he was delivering….his only task. But he was nice enough to offer that he would drop the delivery charge if we wouldn’t report it…
After a tense conversation with the factory they agreed to make another print, but now we would be getting all the parts about a day and half before the event, without ever having a chance to test fit anything. This time the rep delivered them personally and we were off to assembly.
Luckily all the tolerances were ok and we were off to the races, first by installing the mirrors:
The soldering of 30 LED super dense (144 LEDs / meter) strips was a huge PITA, everything is tiny, the back of the LED strip had adhesive on it which had to be stripped before soldering connections, and generally it wasn’t very fun work.
Coding required a beefy micro with plenty of memory to handle the nearly 800 addressable LEDs, and we used a spared Arduino Mega2560 we had from an older large-scale project (XinTianDi CNY Rooster) - and since we were out of time we only spent a few hours coming up with 5 different animated modes to show it all off.
