After a lot of major, unforeseen setbacks, I finally have a working prototype of my infinity icosahedron, however I had to alter the project slightly from my the design.
The week started out really well, as I was able to finish the CAD model for the frame of the icosahedron on Monday. My friend suggested I switch to using Blender as opposed to Solidworks for this type of model as you can simply just insert an icosahedron solid and then it’s easy to work from there to hollow out the icosahedron and extrude cut each side. I then split the CAD file in half to print the top and bottom of the icosahedron separately to make assembly of the LEDs inside easier.
The top half printed perfectly first try so I was optimistic that the bottom half (which is almost identical to the top half) would be just as easy and I would be well on my way to begin assembly early in the week. Unfortunately, this was not the case as the bottom print managed to somehow fail 4 times in a row, which ended up pushing my assembly date all the way up to Sunday night. This is where I quickly ran into my second major issue: the LED strips that I bought off Amazon that are able to be cut and then re-soldiered with wires ended up being too difficult to soldier. This was because I didn’t quite realize how small the soldier pads of the LEDs were going to be (nor did I even consider this being an issue), and as a result my finest soldier head ended up still being magnitudes larger than the soldier pad, making it impossible to soldier wires without melting the nearby LEDs.
Luckily I ended up only cutting up 1 of my 2 LED strips, so I ended up wrapping the inside of the 2 large horizontal rings with the uncut LED strip, and then lines the other edges with the cut LED strip for purely ascetic purposes. Finally after assembling the two halves of the icosahedron, laser cutting the sides, and glueing the sides in I finished the first working prototype of the infinity icosahedron. For now I just have the same example code running from last week, however now that I finally have an idea on how they look inside the icosahedron I can work on recoding the visualizer to fit the current setup. Bellow I just have a couple images of it lighting up in tune with music.
Even though not all of the LEDs are not functional I do not think it takes away from the project because I couldn’t even notice. I think that the project would look really good on a solid back background and floor so that all of the focus is on the dice.
I think this is so cool! And I also think that the missing LEDs don’t take away at all, it looks really cool!
I think your project looks awesome! I really like the picture you took of it up close with the focus on the led lights. I also find it impressive that they light up in tune with the music, so for the final presentation I think having a video of it with a song would be nice.
This looks awesome and the missing LEDs are not that noticeable. If anything, it’s probably better so that the icosahedron is not that bright.
I was able to see this at the makerspace and thought it already looked very nice! The only thing to play around could possibly be the background.
This is a really cool project! I’m glad you decided to go with music visualization