An Epic Journey of Craftiness Begins

-
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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Git. The WHAT and WHY Edition.

-
Image
Lately I've seen a lot of new/aspiring developers talk about difficulties learning git . I was confused at first, because there are approximately a zillion git tutorials out there. But then I started really looking at what people were saying AND what all those tutorials contain. The problem is most tutorials start out with "here are a ton of git commands to memorize", and this is not where people are having problems. People are having problems with "what is git, why should I learn it, and what does it look like to use it in a real-life project?", and those questions are largely not answered in all those millions of tutorials. So at the risk of redundancy, I'm going to attempt to address these questions in Yet Another Article About Git. First, I want to make it clear that if you want to be a programmer, any kind of programmer, you need to know git. You just DO. This is the short version of the answer to "why should I learn it?".  The medium length a
Read more

"Does it get easier?" Yes, but Also No...

-
Image
Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay It's complicated... "Does it get easier?" I see some form of this question asked a lot in beginner programming groups. I always struggle with how to answer this honestly and clearly, because the truth is not that simple. In some ways it does get easier, but in other ways it is almost always going to be difficult if you are advancing in your career . If you are a programmer and your job is easy for years on end, the most likely explanation is that you're in the kind of dead-end position that people try to avoid, not the kind of position people dream about when they think of becoming a developer. Most likely you are not getting better at being a dev, not working with new tech or solving new kinds of problems, not being given more responsibility, etc. etc. etc. I've seen some pushback from other newbie programmers on the idea that it could remain difficult past the initial learning stage. Notably I have never once seen somebody who
Read more

How to Land Your First Dev Job: Develop Yourself, Market Yourself

-
Image
Image by magnetme from Pixabay In the coding and tech groups I'm in, I see the same question asked over and over by folks who are just learning to code, finishing up a bootcamp, degree, or other training program, or who have been looking for that first job for awhile and not having any luck: "what do I need to do to get my first dev job?" There's a whole ton of info out there on this topic, but it's scattered all over, so I thought I would gather together the best resources I've come across and share them, along with a bit of context, to try and help everybody struggling with or just plain wondering about this. There are a lot  of things you can do to improve your chances of finding a job and hopefully shorten your job search. They are broadly divided into 2 categories: developing yourself and your skills, and marketing yourself and your skills. Note that you don't need to do everything on this list, nor do you need to do it all at once. This is an "
Read more