An Epic Journey of Craftiness Begins

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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'd add LEDs to look like it was firing its laser and blowing up a planet.

To start, we needed to construct the geodesic dome. We got our general plans from a very helpful Instructable, although we customized the size of the panels according to the size of Death Star we wanted. After some debate we settled on 6' in diameter. There was talk of 8', but the triangles for that would've been gigantic and it would've been hard to get enough boxes of such a large size, plus that just seemed too big for our space. I then used a geodesic dome calculator (of which there are a surprising number online) to figure out the size of triangles we'd need.

The calculator gave me the lengths for the sides of the triangles, and I did some math to figure out the height, as that made drawing the triangle templates much easier. We don't have access to a laser cutter and didn't want to spend the $$ on sheets of cardboard, so we cut all 75 triangles out of scrounged boxes, by hand, during our lunch hours. In the end we needed 45 isosceles triangles 12.95" high, with a 14.53" base and 14.85" sides, plus 30 isosceles triangles 10.23" high, with a 14.53" base and 10.23" sides.

We started tracing and cutting triangles at the end of January or so, and finished around two weeks ago. We found it was more efficient to have one person do all the tracing while another person did all the cutting. The biggest challenge for this part? Finding enough big cardboard boxes.


As you can see, we added a strip on each edge for attaching the triangles together. When cutting them out, we scored the cardboard first with an exacto while using a yardstick to keep the lines straight. We then used a box cutter to cut the rest of the way. We then scored the fold lines very lightly, and finally pushed in the edges of the scoring, so the cardboard was sure to fold nicely.

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