Thanks to Christian Martinez and Mike Katchmar for the inspiration. Clobbered together a snowflake. Main ingredients were cardboard boxes, hot glue, shower curtains and packing tape. Had a 100 pixel led string and designed the largest snowflake I could easily make. Still had to cut and solder the string 18 times. Was lucky enough to find a large wall-wart power supply that kicked out 12 and 5 volts at high enough amperage. Kind of tricky using 12 volt leds, and 3.3 volt processor [teensy]. Thanks again to the folks who’ve been perfecting the FastLED library for making it so easy to be the neighborhood’s mad scientist. I am lazy and haven’t mapped out the leds for ‘side to side’ effects etc. Which is the main question I have- how the heck do you map out leds in something like a Fibonacci spiral to have letter scroll over them?
Hi @Charles_Schmitt_Deta - Fantastic build and animation! How tall is it?
FYI, I just started using 12 volt WS2811 with a Teensy 3.2 and 3.6 and with a WEMOS D1 Mini Pro. I use a single 12 volt power supply along with a DC-DC buck step down converter linear regulator to power the MCU. I found these are quite good on Ebay at:
They are inexpensive and work well to power the MCU. You do need a meter when setting the output voltage. I have a few that are more expensive that include a digital meter of the output voltage, too.
For being clobbered together it looks great. I appreciate your mixed media of building materials!
Glad i could be of inspiration. Looks better than mine lol. I have all my LEDs mapped out but havent had the time to put some patterns together yet. I should be setup for next christmas thou. I gotta focus on setting up lights around the perimeter of my home for now.
But yeah i dont plan on making another snowflake the same way it was way too difficult to solder about 100 wires lol. Ill probably use bullet style LEDs next time or get some custom PCBs cooked up.
ouahhhhh beautiful project. congratulations. the light effect is really fun. Thank you for sharing
This looks really cool! How tall is it? The guy walking in front of it makes it look huge! You have some cool patterns in there. Maybe it will inspire me to make some updates for next holidays.
@Mike_Katchmar I Think thats is 2meterx1meter min. i have I also noticed the man walking in front.
@Ken_White That’s a great idea and makes for a much simpler build.
@Cristian_Martinez The bullet style makes it quite easy, you can come by them pretty cheaply. I still ended up soldering things together because rather than doubling back on each arm, I cut the string and ran wires to the next section. Means that it’s half as bright, but bigger, it stands about 8 feet tall.
@marmil It was one of those projects where I thought I was just prototyping, but halfway through decided to go all the way. Once we get warmer weather it will be toast- though I threw polyurethane on the cardboard - ithe enclosure is not waterproof, too weak to transport and I really don’t have any place to store it over the summer. I’ll probably just rip the leds out and build one again next winter using corrugated plastic board. It’s always amazing how easy these things are to make the second time around. Especially if you’ve got the coding done already.
Yeah i think mine fried due to lack of “waterproofing” it wont do anything now lol. Ill definitely stock up on those bullet style LEDs and make a collapsable one for this christmas. Maybe by then ill have a better understanding of coding and make my own patterns lol
@Cristian_Martinez If I do it again I would consider trying to make it in 1/3rds so that I could break it down for storage or transport. What’s nice about the led pixels is that they’re totally waterproof so the only things that really need to stay dry are the power source and mcu, shrink wrap is probably enough for 5-12 volt connections.
I would go with a 3D printed enclosure for the board with flex material compressed between both halves to act as a seal 
I love the animations, would you mind sharing the code?