Put this together over the weekend using FastLED. This is a gift for a backer for our Diodome art project for 2013 Burning Man.
Machined the main body of it out of a 3/4" pine panel using my Shapeoko, then cut the back panel from 1/4" plywood. Recessed a track for the wires so it fits into the body perfectly. 1/4" acrylic then pushes into the top to act as a diffuser.
Running off an Arduino Uno for simplicity’s sake (the VIN pin on the Arduino Uno can support upto 1amp directly so it makes wiring it all up really easy as you can see from the photo of the control box.).
Working pretty good, have another day to make animations if anyone has any suggestions.
@Jon_Burroughs I got a Shapeoko 1 over a year ago, but earlier this year upgraded it to something like a Shapeoko 2, longer Y axis, 40x40 x-axis etc. This made it a lot more useful. Its a good starter machine, its taken a lot of time to get all the issues ironed out, getting things square and working reliably etc but I’ve learned a lot. If you think you want to get into CNC but don’t want to burn $2k straight off, then I think its a good way to start. Longer term I’ll be looking at either getting access to a bigger stronger machine or building one if I ever have the space!
@Justin_Eastman you could definitely do a design like this using laser cutting. However you won’t be able to embed the top and bottom into the body in a single piece like that, you’ll have to layer several pieces together. I preferred the aesthetic of having the body be single piece.
@Justin_Eastman nice. One thing you might want to try is I’ve noticed there’s a lot of light seeping through the wood in certain colors. It appears red goes through the pine really nicely along the grains. You can get some lovely effects like that.
@Jon_Burroughs Jon, IMO the Shapeoko is a little bit too entry-level. Look at the Routy on OpenBuilds. You can always recycle the parts into a bigger machine. I’ve just made a 2.3M x 1.5M one using their biggest extrusion.
@Ben_Delarre I am building one for a friend right now - mine is significantly larger. I think it’s going to be well under $1000, even allowing for the very expensive shipping to here. We can’t buy any parts here - any. Nothing, nada. Not a machine screw or a bearing, so everything is imported. Adds to the expense. They have a comprehensive BOM on the routy docs page.
