(Thanks for the interest - welcome Chris to the team!) Our IT task at Solarbotics have grown beyond "Did you try turning it off and then on again?", so we're in the hiring market for an IT Guru & website manager. Please, we're only interested in applicants that can work here, in Calgary, Alberta. Sorry, […]
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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BEP Requests?
We've been kicking around what to do as our next Bicore Experimenter's PCB Application note. As we're deadlocked on several ideas, we thought it'd be worthwhile to open it up to you. What sort of new BEP application would you like to see us produce next? Let us know by clicking on the "Posted By:" […]
Project: LED Earrings
The idea of adorning oneself with glowing bits has been around forever, but instead of smearing ourselves with phosphorescent jellyfish or placing fireflies in ears like some uncivilized cavemen we went for simple LED earrings. We made a build that involves a simple slow-scroll RGB LED and a few reflective bits to bounce that pretty […]
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Warning: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov for more information. This item was manufactured prior to August 31, 2018.