Shambling Towards Perfection

Once we finished cutting out our triangles, we started painting them. We brushed on acrylic paint instead of using spray paint, as it seemed logistically easier. Finding a place on campus to spray paint 75 triangles and finding enough time when it wasn't windy would have been a pain. It took much less time to paint than cut, so we were done with all the triangles within 2 weeks. After we had enough triangles painted, we started gluing them together into panels. The geodesic dome pattern we used has a single pentagon at the top, then a ring of 5 hexagons, then a ring of 5 pentagons, then a ring of 5 half hexagons (to make a flat bottom). This makes for a total of 11 panels plus 5 half panels. We used wood glue for this step. This turned out to be a good choice, as the wood glue starts setting up pretty quickly, so once we got the triangles properly positioned they didn't slip around too much. We did use binder clips on the glued edges to hold them together as they dried, j...

For my next electronics project, I am building a gigantic cardboard and LED strip Death Star. Background: My department at work enjoys decorating for the holidays. We always talk about how we should have really awesome decorations, being IT and all. After last Halloween we agreed we were going to do something truly epic for the next Halloween, and we agreed we'd need to start working on decorations right away to have enough time to make something super cool during our lunch hours. Thus we voted on the theme for Halloween 2018 in November of 2017. The theme we picked: Star Wars, of course. We had some vague ideas of making a big Death Star, and hanging some inflatable decorations, like this excellent Millenium Falcon . In January we started to really try and figure out what we were doing, and over the course of a couple of lunch hours we generated a plan: we'd build a giant cardboard geodesic dome and paint it to look like the Death Star. And if we had enough time, we...

It's been nearly 2 years since my last post, so I figured I should actually update this again. I've continued to take pottery classes and make awesome stuff, but my bigger current obsession is combining crafting and programming via microcontrollers such as the Arduino. For my first venture into this realm I wanted to do a small project just to get familiar with Arduino and working with electronics. I haven't done anything with circuits since high school physics (Lego Mindstorms in the robotics class during my masters doesn't count; there was no wire or resistors or anything like that), so I had to relearn pretty much everything to do with electricity. Anyhow last fall I followed a tutorial for an Arduino-powered sound-reactive LED strip . The only tweak I made was changing the threshold for noise; the tutorial assumed a louder environment than the quiet office where I mounted this. We had holiday music playing in the background at work, so this was part of our decorat...