Stargrave and other random stuff

Now that the construction is mainly complete, I painted the white lines on the floor and then masked them off and painted the floor grey and then masked that off and painted the black lines. This didnt turn out as neat as I was hoping and I had to tidy this up with a brush.

I thought it was time to start work on Zen. I wanted this to light up as well as look the part, I started with some acrylic spheres from amazon which come in halves, they are intended as Christmas decorations. I stippled some gold paint on the inside and then masked off some lines and squares and then painted black over the rest.

The electronics behind Zen are WS2812B led’s on 8×8 matrix panel (I have ordered a smaller one to see if I like that better), controlled via an arduino uno with 1000uf capacitor in parallel with a 5v power supply and 330 ohm resistor in the command line from the arduino. I had to do some fairly basic programming to get the led’s to light up the way I wanted but it wasn’t that difficult.

The basic circuit I got from this guy’s web site as I no electrionics wiz

https://cohenelectronics.net/led-matrix-arduino-tutorial/

The main problem I had was other led’s were flickering when the ones I wanted were lighting up and after a lot of googling I finally found the answer, I need to connect the ground wire from the arduino to the circuit to solve that.

I have ordered a smaller panel with more dense led’s and couple of others larger ones and I think these might be useful for other things as the led’s are tricoloured and you can program animations into them which may come in some other projects.