11 ms·

DIY RGB Icosahedron

573 points by blutack 5y ago

rafaelturk 5y ago
This Amazing, pure Art. Kudos.
tmd83 5y ago
Just beautiful and a quick scroll seems to suggest a fairly involved undertaking. Hoping to have fun reading it but for now just enjoyed the look of it, I think having so many sides adds a lot of visual appeal.
bla3 5y ago
Beautiful. If you're just skimming, be sure to slow down and read the "Bodge Time" section.
jpm_sd 5y ago
Really cool project and brutally honest write-up, I LOLed at "I’ll leave that for future Greg to worry about." Keep up the good work!
- bloopernova 5y ago
  Something I say when I'm thinking about what to comment: "Screw you, future me!" It's so easy to leave things for future me to deal with. But future me would think present me is an asshole for not documenting. Try to not be an asshole to your future self :)
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    A lot of the time when I’m doing something unpleasant but necessary, I say “You’re welcome, future me!”. And now and then when I realize I’m doing something super-easily because of the hard work of past me, I say “thanks, past me!”.
solarkraft 5y ago
This is interesting. I’ve been thinking of making an icosahedron shaped room lamp with separately controlled sides for a while and this might provide some inspiration and perhaps motivation to start thinking about it again.
jaywalk 5y ago
I'm in awe at the amount of patience required to hand-place 2400 tiny LEDs. I don't have it in me.
- stavros 5y ago
  Yeah, wow. It takes a special kind of person for sure. I would do three before getting tired (plus my eyes have this weird thing where the center of my vision goes blurry if I focus up close for a few minutes, so odd).
- jhgb 5y ago
  You'd probably build a machine to do that for you.
  - altacc 5y ago
    This is a one off build, where they placed the LEDs by hand.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      I imagine that even one-off builds of complicated things may include specialized tools in their construction.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        Most people do not appreciate that when doing custom builds, it is often the case that it takes more time to build jigs and other things to help than it takes to do the actual build.
        jhgb 5y ago
        Yes, but GGGGP suggested that the alternative would be not building it due to lack of patience. That's not "extra time" but the difference between having and not having a result.
      - 5y ago
kzrdude 5y ago
Does anyone understand the 'footprint rotated 90 degrees' issue? I can't see it in the picture or understand what the problem is.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  Each LED has four contacts on the bottom. When the solder melts, surface tension of the solder should pull those contacts into alignment with the pads on the board. I think what they're saying is that they they accidentally laid out the contacts in the wrong orientation, and needed to rotate the LED 90 degrees to put each contact on the appropriate pad. Because the arrangement of those pads is not quite a square, the LEDs do make the connections, but they don't get aligned quite straight.
  - wlesieutre 5y ago
    Missed edit window, but comment should say "laid out the pads in the wrong orientation"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bullen 5y ago
I would make a usable display with leds like these if I could!
blutack 5y ago
I came across this randomly on kitspace (https://kitspace.org/boards/github.com/gregdavill/d20-hardware/d20-tri-panel-4x1/ https://kitspace.org/boards/github.com/gregdavill/d20-hardwa...) and thought other people might be as impressed as I was!
jcims 5y ago
This is the kind of full stack developer I'd like to be. Started tinkering with electronics in earnest about a year ago but it feels like I'm a decade away from being able to build stuff like this of my own volition.
- stagger87 5y ago
  Building a pcb that lights up leds is kinda the hello world for electronics. I think you'd be surprised how close you are to this.
  - jcims 5y ago
    I think the part that is intimidating to me is the power/clock/microcontroller integration. Maybe the gateway is to design a PCB that just connects the LEDs and over time add more and more components to it.
    - mason55 5y ago
      If you’re just starting then imo it’s easier to go the other way. Start with a fully-built dev board like a Wemos D1 mini. Keep building things and as you run into roadblocks and learn how to get around them you’ll naturally develop the knowledge to get further into fabbing your own integrated PCB.
    - mnw21cam 5y ago
      I bit this particular bullet a couple of months ago. Turns out that a very cheap board like an Arduino Nano Every has a power voltage regulator (that will accept 6-21V supply) and a built-in clock, so you don't need to integrate anything. (As it turned out, I wanted a more stable clock signal for timing purposes than the arduino clock, so I attached a 32.768kHz crystal to one of the inputs, and that also was very easy. I also attached a 4-digit 7-segment display, as there are enough I/O pins, a thermistor, several buttons/switches, and a stepper motor controller. It was easier than I thought. Give it a try.)
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      You might look up various DIY arduino designs (starting on a breadboard). You can start with very barebones selection of components, move it to a proto-board, and then modify it to your needs. Adafruit and Sparkfun have great resources for how everything they sell works.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
This is magical! This level of focus is impressive.
qwertox 5y ago
Next step would be to add an IMU into it so that it can react to movement. Like behaving as if it's half full with water and make the liquid move around when placed on the table or picked up.
CodeIsTheEnd 5y ago
If anyone is curious, the origami stellated [1] icosahedron in the second image is built from Sonobe modules [2][3], a kind of modular origami. Basic structures formed by Sonobe units have 3-sided 45-45-90 pyramids on top of an underlying polyhedra with triangular faces. Each Sonobe unit functions as an edge in the underlying structure, so building a structure around an icosahedron, which has 20 faces and 30 edges, requires 30 units, and yields a stellated icosahedron with 60 faces and 90 edges. You can also build a stellated octahedron from 12 pieces, and a stellated tetrahedron (which actually just appears as a cube) with 6 pieces, but that's just the beginning [4]! [1]: Strictly speaking, it's not a true stellation, which is formed by extending the planes of faces until they intersect. [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonobe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonobe [3]: https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/290032/original/oragami.pdf https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/290032/original/oragami.p... (instructions for folding; I believe the image uses the two-mountain folds variation on the first page) [4]: https://www.polypompholyx.com/2017/01/modularorigami/ https://www.polypompholyx.com/2017/01/modularorigami/
- dgritsko 5y ago
  I love HN, I stopped as soon as I saw that second image and came to the comment section hoping that there would be a comment like this one. I know what I'm doing this afternoon.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
That is incredibly cool. I'd think it would be a great programmable D&D dice, except that it might not handle being tossed around.
jopsen 5y ago
Wow, that's a lot of work... Next time (LOL), maybe put a gyro-sensor inside it, and program the light such that waves mimic motion... or...
- NamTaf 5y ago
  The end of the article talks about mapping the LEDs to 3D space. Once you've done that, I agree that throwing in an accelerometer would be awesome. You could take what he did on his cube[1] and then have it so the animation always flows down in gravity. Then roll it like a die :) [1]: https://twitter.com/esden/status/1160309492896215040 https://twitter.com/esden/status/1160309492896215040
- ansible 5y ago
  Or you could have a mode where you just tap it, and it "rolls a d20", where the RNG generates a number from 1 to 20, and then animates the faces rolling around a little and finally ending with the random number chosen on top.
tired_and_awake 5y ago
From the future work aspect the author might consider adding an IMU to the device. It could mimic dice behavior or change state based on motion. Also a great opportunity to learn about dynamics and signal processing.
terom 5y ago
I wonder if the people commenting "I want one" would still agree if they knew how much it would cost to produce and assemble in small quantities. Would 1000€/piece even be enough to cover costs?
- rowanG077 5y ago
  Define "small quantities". about 100? no. about 5000? maybe yes.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Imagine you're the one doing the building/assembly. Does 5000 sound small to you? Does 100?
    - rowanG077 5y ago
      Something like this will never be profitable to assemble by hand. It's not a matter if it being a small quantity or not.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        Something like this at the 1k price point isn't profitable? If you've never done anything like this before, I can see it being daunting. However, if you'd never done something like this before, you'd be crazy to start here. When learning anything new you do a 'hello world' version of something. Bicycles have training wheels. Electronics has starter projects as well. You work up to something like this. Being thrown into the deep end is not the best way to learn how to swim. Eventually though, you get comfortable that project like this are not daunting. You get your stacks of PCBs, you get all of the interconnect wires, you get all of the LEDs, you get all of your tools, then you just draw the rest of the fucking owl. I would not be looking forward to making 5000 of these, but I would not be afraid of 100. It won't be done in a week, but by the time I got to 100, I'd be pretty good at it. Again, if you know you're making 100, then the added time of making the proper jig is well worth it. Also, isn't this something that Kickstarter would be perfect for?
mhb 5y ago
It's a great write up, but is it really worth asking for free PCBs that would cost ~$5 for a project whose cost is >$100?
amelius 5y ago
> I went to assemble one, and when trying to determine the LED orientation I discovered a fatal flaw. I had the footprint rotated 90 degrees. (-___-) Why was that a problem? The leds are square, so you could just rotate them by 90 degrees?
- bananasbandanas 5y ago
  > I attempted to assemble a board bey placing LEDs at 90 degrees, but ultimately this was a failure, the pads look reasonably symmetrical, but they’re not exactly.
nxpnsv 5y ago
Spectacular!
roland35 5y ago
That is a beautiful project. With huge numbers of RGB LEDs I wonder if in the future using some sort of small FPGA per panel would make things easier? I have seen that done in some persistence-of-vision projects.
Workaccount2 5y ago
Man, I lived that same nightmare scenario with the flipped G-S pins on a MOSFET. I had the board spun and excitedly soldered it all up. It was a relay logic project with a few micros, tons of LEDs, swaths of general logic chips, and a lot of relays. It was a hybrid mechanical computer, nothing massive, but a lot of components. Fired it up for the first time and got nothing. Just like OP I narrowed it down to the relay coils not firing. No signal out of the driving MOSFETs. Being a fool I had trusted a random online library for the MOSFET footprint, and of course the footprint had the G-S pins flipped. I painfully bodged one before deciding to just bite the bullet and spin another one. I cannot imagine doing 300 like OP did, good on him.
punnerud 5y ago
This made my day, after watching the assembly video: «You assambled all 19 before testing first one?» «….Yes. I am not a smart. -_-*» When you are in the production flow, it is hard to stop for testing.. Good to see it’s not just me that can make this kind of mistake.
monkpit 5y ago
I am looking to do something like this as a Christmas gift for my son. However, this looks pretty labor-intensive (300 bodge wires!). I have dabbled with arduino in the past but I am no expert with hardware. Does anyone have suggestions of cool projects similar to this? Toy-like LED things :) Or even a website I could browse to find similar projects (like Instructables maybe)?
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  Strings or panels of addressible LEDs would be a good place to start. Adafruit brands these as "neopixels" but the specific LED most of them use is a "WS2812", "WS2812B", or "WS2813". With these you have a single data line from a microcontroller to control the LEDs, and there are libraries to help you do that. I've lit some up and fiddled with them and they're pretty cool, but I haven't come up with anything more serious to use them on yet. RGB lights on stuff for the sake of it isn't my aesthetic. But maybe a clock and weather forecast station with animated rain effects or something. Lots of info here: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide https://www.learnrobotics.org/blog/neopixel-projects-ridiculously-cool/ https://www.learnrobotics.org/blog/neopixel-projects-ridicul...
  - blutack 5y ago
    WLED is also fantastic if you are using WS/APA/STK style addressable LEDs. You just need a dirt cheap ESP32/8266 and you get a wifi connected lamp with a lovely web ui, cool animations, android app, timers, home automation integrations etc etc. https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED
- thoughtpalette 5y ago
  tindie.com has some cool little projects.
- jvyduna 5y ago
  Have a look at Pixelblaze. It's a subset of JS on an ESP32 with no compilation - you code in a web browser and the LEDs just render live. I've done plenty of Arduino; this sidesteps the mundane getting-started knowledge base. This $6 37-LED mini hexagonal board is a fun starting point, cheaper than most strips and matrices: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/hex-rgb-led-board-sk6812 https://shop.m5stack.com/products/hex-rgb-led-board-sk6812
doctorhandshake 5y ago
This is super bad ass. I made 8 LED icosahedra and 12 octahedra for a permanent lighting install in Boulder. They’re much larger (and thus were easier to make albeit much harder to handle ;) ) than this. I still gotta do the case study but some pics: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv0dYbdH0yw/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv0dYbdH0yw/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv-sF0oH4Rd/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv-sF0oH4Rd/ https://www.instagram.com/p/B5czvt_n3ME/ https://www.instagram.com/p/B5czvt_n3ME/ [edit: less unintentionally self-aggrandizing]
kryptn 5y ago
I'd love to design and build something like this myself, but all of the electronic design seems so daunting. Where's a good place to get started with this?
- anyfactor 5y ago
  I am in the same spot as you are. I enjoy channels like Great Scott, Carl Bugeja, ElectroBoom and EEVblog. They make it working with electronics seem quite easy. Planning to get some GPIO headers for my raspberry Pi, breadboards and led lights to just get started.
formerly_proven 5y ago
If you're not familiar with electronics the macro photographs might confuse you as to how small all of this is. The MOSFETs he reworked by hand are 1 mm across the longest edge. Wire looks like 0.1 mm, the individual strands in most stranded wire are this thick.
joejohns 5y ago
Is there any available resources in which I can jump start my way into making these kinds of creations?
- jrockway 5y ago
  If you want to make an icosahedron, you're on your own, if you want to play with grids of LEDs, then there is a lot of stuff you can buy and write a little bit of code for. You could get something like the Matrix Portal and an off-the-shelf LED matrix to make an Internet-connected sign: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4745 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4745 (I use one of these to show the indoor and outdoor temperature, and it's only a few lines of Python.) If you already have a microcontroller in mind and just want a grid of LEDs, these are great: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3444 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3444. I have a bunch of them wired in tandem to serve as a display for my GPS clock: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jrockway/beaglebone-gps-clock/master/img/new-display.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jrockway/beaglebone-gps-cl... Also, you probably don't need an FPGA to drive LED matrixes anymore. The RP2040's PIOs do a great job (the RP2040 is a $1 dual-core microcontroller), and honestly even a plain Cortex M0 does a perfectly fine job with cycles left over to run user code (for 64x32 grids anyway). The project this post documents probably could have been done with APA102s and a simple microcontroller spitting out a SPI signal to change their colors. No FPGA, no MOSFET bodges, etc. 2400 pixels is 7.2kB of data, which you can easily output many times per second.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    > 7.2kB of data, which you can easily output many times per second I found that this adds up quick if you attempt variable brightness via PWM. At 1Khz this is 7.2MB/s of data.
    - jrockway 5y ago
      Yeah, that's why FPGAs typically drive the matrix of dumb LEDs. But if you use APA102s, they remember their PWM setting, and a little chip inside each LED handles that. You just burst the data out over SPI, and the LEDs remain lit until you inform them of a new color to display. Expensive, but easy to use!
derac 5y ago
Wow, amazing end result. It would be cool if it could detect orientation and change the animation based on that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

573 points by blutack 5y ago

This Amazing, pure Art. Kudos.

Just beautiful and a quick scroll seems to suggest a fairly involved undertaking. Hoping to have fun reading it but for now just enjoyed the look of it, I think having so many sides adds a lot of visual appeal.

bla3 5y ago

Beautiful. If you're just skimming, be sure to slow down and read the "Bodge Time" section.

jpm_sd 5y ago

Really cool project and brutally honest write-up, I LOLed at "I’ll leave that for future Greg to worry about." Keep up the good work!

bloopernova 5y ago
Something I say when I'm thinking about what to comment: "Screw you, future me!" It's so easy to leave things for future me to deal with. But future me would think present me is an asshole for not documenting. Try to not be an asshole to your future self :)
- egypturnash 5y ago
  A lot of the time when I’m doing something unpleasant but necessary, I say “You’re welcome, future me!”. And now and then when I realize I’m doing something super-easily because of the hard work of past me, I say “thanks, past me!”.

solarkraft 5y ago

This is interesting. I’ve been thinking of making an icosahedron shaped room lamp with separately controlled sides for a while and this might provide some inspiration and perhaps motivation to start thinking about it again.

jaywalk 5y ago

I'm in awe at the amount of patience required to hand-place 2400 tiny LEDs. I don't have it in me.

stavros 5y ago
Yeah, wow. It takes a special kind of person for sure. I would do three before getting tired (plus my eyes have this weird thing where the center of my vision goes blurry if I focus up close for a few minutes, so odd).
jhgb 5y ago
You'd probably build a machine to do that for you.
- altacc 5y ago
  This is a one off build, where they placed the LEDs by hand.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    I imagine that even one-off builds of complicated things may include specialized tools in their construction.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Most people do not appreciate that when doing custom builds, it is often the case that it takes more time to build jigs and other things to help than it takes to do the actual build.
      - jhgb 5y ago
        Yes, but GGGGP suggested that the alternative would be not building it due to lack of patience. That's not "extra time" but the difference between having and not having a result.
    - 5y ago

kzrdude 5y ago

Does anyone understand the 'footprint rotated 90 degrees' issue? I can't see it in the picture or understand what the problem is.

wlesieutre 5y ago
Each LED has four contacts on the bottom. When the solder melts, surface tension of the solder should pull those contacts into alignment with the pads on the board. I think what they're saying is that they they accidentally laid out the contacts in the wrong orientation, and needed to rotate the LED 90 degrees to put each contact on the appropriate pad. Because the arrangement of those pads is not quite a square, the LEDs do make the connections, but they don't get aligned quite straight.
- wlesieutre 5y ago
  Missed edit window, but comment should say "laid out the pads in the wrong orientation"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bullen 5y ago

I would make a usable display with leds like these if I could!

blutack 5y ago

I came across this randomly on kitspace (https://kitspace.org/boards/github.com/gregdavill/d20-hardware/d20-tri-panel-4x1/ https://kitspace.org/boards/github.com/gregdavill/d20-hardwa...) and thought other people might be as impressed as I was!

jcims 5y ago

This is the kind of full stack developer I'd like to be. Started tinkering with electronics in earnest about a year ago but it feels like I'm a decade away from being able to build stuff like this of my own volition.

stagger87 5y ago
Building a pcb that lights up leds is kinda the hello world for electronics. I think you'd be surprised how close you are to this.
- jcims 5y ago
  I think the part that is intimidating to me is the power/clock/microcontroller integration. Maybe the gateway is to design a PCB that just connects the LEDs and over time add more and more components to it.
  - mason55 5y ago
    If you’re just starting then imo it’s easier to go the other way. Start with a fully-built dev board like a Wemos D1 mini. Keep building things and as you run into roadblocks and learn how to get around them you’ll naturally develop the knowledge to get further into fabbing your own integrated PCB.
  - mnw21cam 5y ago
    I bit this particular bullet a couple of months ago. Turns out that a very cheap board like an Arduino Nano Every has a power voltage regulator (that will accept 6-21V supply) and a built-in clock, so you don't need to integrate anything. (As it turned out, I wanted a more stable clock signal for timing purposes than the arduino clock, so I attached a 32.768kHz crystal to one of the inputs, and that also was very easy. I also attached a 4-digit 7-segment display, as there are enough I/O pins, a thermistor, several buttons/switches, and a stepper motor controller. It was easier than I thought. Give it a try.)
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    You might look up various DIY arduino designs (starting on a breadboard). You can start with very barebones selection of components, move it to a proto-board, and then modify it to your needs. Adafruit and Sparkfun have great resources for how everything they sell works.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

This is magical! This level of focus is impressive.

qwertox 5y ago

Next step would be to add an IMU into it so that it can react to movement. Like behaving as if it's half full with water and make the liquid move around when placed on the table or picked up.

CodeIsTheEnd 5y ago

If anyone is curious, the origami stellated [1] icosahedron in the second image is built from Sonobe modules [2][3], a kind of modular origami. Basic structures formed by Sonobe units have 3-sided 45-45-90 pyramids on top of an underlying polyhedra with triangular faces. Each Sonobe unit functions as an edge in the underlying structure, so building a structure around an icosahedron, which has 20 faces and 30 edges, requires 30 units, and yields a stellated icosahedron with 60 faces and 90 edges. You can also build a stellated octahedron from 12 pieces, and a stellated tetrahedron (which actually just appears as a cube) with 6 pieces, but that's just the beginning [4]! [1]: Strictly speaking, it's not a true stellation, which is formed by extending the planes of faces until they intersect. [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonobe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonobe [3]: https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/290032/original/oragami.pdf https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/290032/original/oragami.p... (instructions for folding; I believe the image uses the two-mountain folds variation on the first page) [4]: https://www.polypompholyx.com/2017/01/modularorigami/ https://www.polypompholyx.com/2017/01/modularorigami/

dgritsko 5y ago
I love HN, I stopped as soon as I saw that second image and came to the comment section hoping that there would be a comment like this one. I know what I'm doing this afternoon.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

That is incredibly cool. I'd think it would be a great programmable D&D dice, except that it might not handle being tossed around.

jopsen 5y ago

Wow, that's a lot of work... Next time (LOL), maybe put a gyro-sensor inside it, and program the light such that waves mimic motion... or...

NamTaf 5y ago
The end of the article talks about mapping the LEDs to 3D space. Once you've done that, I agree that throwing in an accelerometer would be awesome. You could take what he did on his cube[1] and then have it so the animation always flows down in gravity. Then roll it like a die :) [1]: https://twitter.com/esden/status/1160309492896215040 https://twitter.com/esden/status/1160309492896215040
ansible 5y ago
Or you could have a mode where you just tap it, and it "rolls a d20", where the RNG generates a number from 1 to 20, and then animates the faces rolling around a little and finally ending with the random number chosen on top.

tired_and_awake 5y ago

From the future work aspect the author might consider adding an IMU to the device. It could mimic dice behavior or change state based on motion. Also a great opportunity to learn about dynamics and signal processing.

terom 5y ago

I wonder if the people commenting "I want one" would still agree if they knew how much it would cost to produce and assemble in small quantities. Would 1000€/piece even be enough to cover costs?

rowanG077 5y ago
Define "small quantities". about 100? no. about 5000? maybe yes.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Imagine you're the one doing the building/assembly. Does 5000 sound small to you? Does 100?
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    Something like this will never be profitable to assemble by hand. It's not a matter if it being a small quantity or not.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      Something like this at the 1k price point isn't profitable? If you've never done anything like this before, I can see it being daunting. However, if you'd never done something like this before, you'd be crazy to start here. When learning anything new you do a 'hello world' version of something. Bicycles have training wheels. Electronics has starter projects as well. You work up to something like this. Being thrown into the deep end is not the best way to learn how to swim. Eventually though, you get comfortable that project like this are not daunting. You get your stacks of PCBs, you get all of the interconnect wires, you get all of the LEDs, you get all of your tools, then you just draw the rest of the fucking owl. I would not be looking forward to making 5000 of these, but I would not be afraid of 100. It won't be done in a week, but by the time I got to 100, I'd be pretty good at it. Again, if you know you're making 100, then the added time of making the proper jig is well worth it. Also, isn't this something that Kickstarter would be perfect for?

mhb 5y ago

It's a great write up, but is it really worth asking for free PCBs that would cost ~$5 for a project whose cost is >$100?

amelius 5y ago

> I went to assemble one, and when trying to determine the LED orientation I discovered a fatal flaw. I had the footprint rotated 90 degrees. (-___-) Why was that a problem? The leds are square, so you could just rotate them by 90 degrees?

bananasbandanas 5y ago
> I attempted to assemble a board bey placing LEDs at 90 degrees, but ultimately this was a failure, the pads look reasonably symmetrical, but they’re not exactly.

nxpnsv 5y ago

Spectacular!

roland35 5y ago

That is a beautiful project. With huge numbers of RGB LEDs I wonder if in the future using some sort of small FPGA per panel would make things easier? I have seen that done in some persistence-of-vision projects.

Workaccount2 5y ago

Man, I lived that same nightmare scenario with the flipped G-S pins on a MOSFET. I had the board spun and excitedly soldered it all up. It was a relay logic project with a few micros, tons of LEDs, swaths of general logic chips, and a lot of relays. It was a hybrid mechanical computer, nothing massive, but a lot of components. Fired it up for the first time and got nothing. Just like OP I narrowed it down to the relay coils not firing. No signal out of the driving MOSFETs. Being a fool I had trusted a random online library for the MOSFET footprint, and of course the footprint had the G-S pins flipped. I painfully bodged one before deciding to just bite the bullet and spin another one. I cannot imagine doing 300 like OP did, good on him.

punnerud 5y ago

This made my day, after watching the assembly video: «You assambled all 19 before testing first one?» «….Yes. I am not a smart. -_-*» When you are in the production flow, it is hard to stop for testing.. Good to see it’s not just me that can make this kind of mistake.

monkpit 5y ago

I am looking to do something like this as a Christmas gift for my son. However, this looks pretty labor-intensive (300 bodge wires!). I have dabbled with arduino in the past but I am no expert with hardware. Does anyone have suggestions of cool projects similar to this? Toy-like LED things :) Or even a website I could browse to find similar projects (like Instructables maybe)?

wlesieutre 5y ago
Strings or panels of addressible LEDs would be a good place to start. Adafruit brands these as "neopixels" but the specific LED most of them use is a "WS2812", "WS2812B", or "WS2813". With these you have a single data line from a microcontroller to control the LEDs, and there are libraries to help you do that. I've lit some up and fiddled with them and they're pretty cool, but I haven't come up with anything more serious to use them on yet. RGB lights on stuff for the sake of it isn't my aesthetic. But maybe a clock and weather forecast station with animated rain effects or something. Lots of info here: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide https://www.learnrobotics.org/blog/neopixel-projects-ridiculously-cool/ https://www.learnrobotics.org/blog/neopixel-projects-ridicul...
- blutack 5y ago
  WLED is also fantastic if you are using WS/APA/STK style addressable LEDs. You just need a dirt cheap ESP32/8266 and you get a wifi connected lamp with a lovely web ui, cool animations, android app, timers, home automation integrations etc etc. https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED https://github.com/Aircoookie/WLED
thoughtpalette 5y ago
tindie.com has some cool little projects.
jvyduna 5y ago
Have a look at Pixelblaze. It's a subset of JS on an ESP32 with no compilation - you code in a web browser and the LEDs just render live. I've done plenty of Arduino; this sidesteps the mundane getting-started knowledge base. This $6 37-LED mini hexagonal board is a fun starting point, cheaper than most strips and matrices: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/hex-rgb-led-board-sk6812 https://shop.m5stack.com/products/hex-rgb-led-board-sk6812

doctorhandshake 5y ago

This is super bad ass. I made 8 LED icosahedra and 12 octahedra for a permanent lighting install in Boulder. They’re much larger (and thus were easier to make albeit much harder to handle ;) ) than this. I still gotta do the case study but some pics: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv0dYbdH0yw/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv0dYbdH0yw/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv-sF0oH4Rd/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Bv-sF0oH4Rd/ https://www.instagram.com/p/B5czvt_n3ME/ https://www.instagram.com/p/B5czvt_n3ME/ [edit: less unintentionally self-aggrandizing]

kryptn 5y ago

I'd love to design and build something like this myself, but all of the electronic design seems so daunting. Where's a good place to get started with this?

anyfactor 5y ago
I am in the same spot as you are. I enjoy channels like Great Scott, Carl Bugeja, ElectroBoom and EEVblog. They make it working with electronics seem quite easy. Planning to get some GPIO headers for my raspberry Pi, breadboards and led lights to just get started.

formerly_proven 5y ago

If you're not familiar with electronics the macro photographs might confuse you as to how small all of this is. The MOSFETs he reworked by hand are 1 mm across the longest edge. Wire looks like 0.1 mm, the individual strands in most stranded wire are this thick.

joejohns 5y ago

Is there any available resources in which I can jump start my way into making these kinds of creations?

jrockway 5y ago
If you want to make an icosahedron, you're on your own, if you want to play with grids of LEDs, then there is a lot of stuff you can buy and write a little bit of code for. You could get something like the Matrix Portal and an off-the-shelf LED matrix to make an Internet-connected sign: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4745 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4745 (I use one of these to show the indoor and outdoor temperature, and it's only a few lines of Python.) If you already have a microcontroller in mind and just want a grid of LEDs, these are great: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3444 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3444. I have a bunch of them wired in tandem to serve as a display for my GPS clock: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jrockway/beaglebone-gps-clock/master/img/new-display.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jrockway/beaglebone-gps-cl... Also, you probably don't need an FPGA to drive LED matrixes anymore. The RP2040's PIOs do a great job (the RP2040 is a $1 dual-core microcontroller), and honestly even a plain Cortex M0 does a perfectly fine job with cycles left over to run user code (for 64x32 grids anyway). The project this post documents probably could have been done with APA102s and a simple microcontroller spitting out a SPI signal to change their colors. No FPGA, no MOSFET bodges, etc. 2400 pixels is 7.2kB of data, which you can easily output many times per second.
- foobarian 5y ago
  > 7.2kB of data, which you can easily output many times per second I found that this adds up quick if you attempt variable brightness via PWM. At 1Khz this is 7.2MB/s of data.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    Yeah, that's why FPGAs typically drive the matrix of dumb LEDs. But if you use APA102s, they remember their PWM setting, and a little chip inside each LED handles that. You just burst the data out over SPI, and the LEDs remain lit until you inform them of a new color to display. Expensive, but easy to use!

derac 5y ago

Wow, amazing end result. It would be cool if it could detect orientation and change the animation based on that.

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