Just when we think we’ve seen all possible combinations of 3D printing, microcontrollers, and pretty blinkenlights coming together to form DIY clocks, [Mukesh_Sankhla] goes and builds this geometric beauty. It’s kaleidoscopic, it’s mosaic, and it sorta resembles stained glass, but is way cheaper and easier.
The crucial part of the print does two jobs — it combines a plate full of holes for a string of addressable RGB LEDs with the light-dividing walls that turn the LEDs into triangular pixels. [Mukesh] designed digits for a clock that each use ten triangles. You’d need an ESP8266 to run the clock code, or if you’d rather sit and admire the rainbow light show unabated by the passing of time, just use an Arduino Uno or something similar.
Most of the aesthetic magic here is in the printed pieces and the FastLED library. It has a bunch of really cool animations baked in that look great with this design. Check out the demo video after the break. The audio is really quiet until the very end of the video, so be warned. In our opinion, the audio isn’t necessary to follow along with the build.
The humble clock takes many lovely forms around here, including pop art.
Cool! As soon as it’s cool enough in the garage to run the 3D printer, I’m going to have to make one.
Pick up a curb treasure fridge… not only do you get a stable temperature for your 3D printer to work in, it’s probably fire and according to Indiana Jones, nuke proof as well.
What temperature would you set it? Does it have enough cooling power to fight against the heat of the build platform and the extruder?
I was wondering why he’d designed the enclosure to be so huge… then the LEDs with all that wire went in. I guess those strings must be cheap, but I’d have spent the time on desoldering and trimming the cables.
It is quite a pretty thing, I think I’ll make one.
One PCB holding soldered LED would be much better… and slim!
Looks like JLCpcb will make a 17cm by 15cm pcb (x5) for about $24 shipped. Wish I had more time on my hands to draw one up.
I used the WS2811 LEDs,each LED is covered with resin we cannot desolder the LEDs. Instead we can use WS2812b LED stip. For that you have to design the Matrix but the code will work fine.
Agreed! I created a new housing and modified your code to use a WS2812b strip with a much smaller housing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj1u9tcMcpY
Link to the .stl and modified code in the description.