A new star in the making

kane

kane

Dedicated elf
Joined
Dec 23, 2010
Messages
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Location
Trigg (Northern suburbs of Perth)
My first star to top my tree was made from acrylic (build information here ), but given I had a bit of a disaster last year, I figured I've been given an opportunity to build something new.

So my new plan is to make a star out of marine ply, drill a heap of 30mm holes in it , and poke a bunch of these pixels through:

Here's a very early photo - I currently only have 6 pixels (when I asked Ray for 6pcs, he took me literally - I obviously wanted 6 strings of 20).. I will cut the star out, leaving around 10-15mm edge from the pixels, and paint it black, so hopefully it'll look pretty good. Having three separate stars should hopefully allow for some different effects. Size wise, it's around 80cm high - would have liked bigger, but it should be fine!

2013-06-14 19.38.34.jpg
 
Looks prey good, but have you considered welding up a frame for the star and then using some of the 60 led per metre strip? This would save you a heap of drilling and given your experience with wind the wire frame would have much less wind resistance than the ply.
 
DannyP said:
Looks prey good, but have you considered welding up a frame for the star and then using some of the 60 led per metre strip? This would save you a heap of drilling and given your experience with wind the wire frame would have much less wind resistance than the ply.
Click to expand...
I'm not a welder, but could probably find someone to do it for me.. And I certainly did think about doing a star with strip - but wanted to do something a little different by using those pixels. My first plan was to mount them on some sort of a steel frame, but worked out that using ply would be a much easier option to get them all mounted - poking them through from the back.

In terms of wind resistance - yes, that's a potential issue - my issue last year was a bit of a freak storm, and was more due to the tree itself rather than the star, but certainly something I need to think about.. At least with the ply option it's relatively cheap to rebuild - due to minimum job costs, a new acrylic star was going to cost me over $200!

The drilling shouldn't take too long - have just spent 20 minutes on it and finished about a quarter, so not a big job as it turns out.
 
battle79 said:
Nice, looks like you added a 4th star in the middle too. Never have too many eh? Can't wait to see it fired up.

cheers,
Rowan
Click to expand...
Haha, yeah, I figured that there was a bit of dead space, so why not!

DannyP said:
Wow didn't realise how dense the pixels will be. Will be bright!!
Click to expand...
Yeah, that was the other reason I wanted to make it easy to mount the pixels - so many of them.

I'm guessing it'll be pretty bright - just have to wait for the pixels to arrive from Ray, mount them, and give it a test!

Next job is a coat of primer and then spray it black..
 
Quick status update - the pixels have arrived, so they've now been mounted in the star. The holes I drilled were 30mm, perfect size for the pixels, except for the fact that I painted the star, meaning they no longer fit. At least I found a good use for the dremel, and used it to sand the edges of the holes back.

All 140 pixels installed, front and back:
[attachimg=1]
[attachimg=2]

I then went to test out each string of 20 pixels, and nothing lit up, which had me stumped. Until I thought about double checking the wiring, and realised that not only is the ground the centre wire (as opposed to the end wire in most my other stuff), they've used green wire for ground and blue for ground (again the opposite of most my other stuff).. All tested well, and the pixels are pretty bright, so 140 of them might be a bit ridiculous.. But oh well.

Next job is to finalise the wiring and power injection, and get it hooked up to LSP with some effects
 
Will you power inject from both ends of the 2 stings? That's going to be a bright star!! Good way to use 2 universes though. I cannot wait to see this up and running...
 
To make sure there's no issues, I've injected at the end of each string of 20 (as these pixels each have 3 LEDs in them).

It looks amazing lit up, and is going to be very bright! Will have to try and get a video done, but it's hard to pickup as it's so bright.
 
You might have to just sequence a 15sec or so with the half power so we can see it on the vid instead of seeing the sun....lol
 
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