This is Gareth Branwyn's latest book on robotics. Why should you care? Well, our own Dave Hrynkiw (dat be me) was honoured with the task of tech-editting it. It's a fun read, with some BEAM and not-so-BEAM projects, so if you're a raw newbie to robotics, this belongs on your bookshelf next to "Junkbots, Bugbots […]
3D Printed Treetop Star
Solar botics
December 9, 2014
Initially inspired by the Moravian Star on Instructables and the fact that we now carry all kinds of 3D printing filament, we decided to make one of our own glowy holiday star. We have used this thing as source files to create a similar treetop decoration of our own.
After some trial and error (due to the Slicer not cooperating)...
...we printed a whole forest of perfect wintery spiky star-ends.
And, well, we just had to have someone live there for a bit. In this case, a snowman:
Our addressable 5mm LEDs were well suited to light this contraption. We drilled a hole in the bottom of each spike..
..to fit the LED's domed part:
And then wired everything up. It wasn't pretty but the WS2812 LED that we used made it much easier than a conventional RGB LED: rather than 3 separate channels, the WS2812 LED only has a data in and data out. Chain them all together and they work like a charm!
And here's the final product, ready to light up our office with wonderful glowing lights!
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Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.