Slater – (Some) things working!

This week I made a lot of progress on my project, but not quite as much as I was hoping. I got the full wooden base cut and it fit together perfectly, and the hardware such as the power supply, switch and slider all mount as intended. I hoped to cut all of the black acrylic, but due to the heat from cutting lots of parallel lines for the light slots, the sheet I had warped badly. I was still able to make two of the pieces including the plate that the LEDs mount to, and I bought a new sheet to remake the other pieces. I also had time to start soldering, and the 4 columns which I finished worked perfectly. This Wednesday I plan to re-cut the black acrylic with a new design (that hopefully won’t warp!) and I’m going to test out engraving settings on a small section of acrylic. I’ll also cut the very bottom of a layer to test my mounting system. Assuming this goes to plan, I will ready the files for all the layers and try and cut at least half of them over the weekend. I’m not entirely sure how long each layer will take, but I could see it being ~45 minutes per layer. My main concern for engraving the layers is the sheer complexity of the SVGs that I have. Each has tens of thousands of line segments, I think the SVG exporter I used converted every edge of a poly into a separate line segment. When I tried loading a tiny segment of one layer into an online version of Retina Engrave, it lagged so badly that it took 5+ seconds to change the zoom level by one increment. I’m worried that the version of Retina Engrave on the computer for the laser is going to crash when I try and load the full size file for a layer.

Here is the 80 LEDs I’ve wired so far, running at about 50% brightness. As you can see by the light on my computer and monitor bezels, they are extremely bright!