While I ended up working on it for about 10 weeks (from few hours once a week to few hours every evening), and probably spending upwards of $100 on materials and components, I'm extremely satisfied with the end result. I knew it will be a long project with lots of challenges, so having all 245 pieces printed, coming together and lightning up felt as quite an accomplishment. #IndicesOfTime #diy #diyprojects #maker

Assembly itself took several hours - while I was proud that it held together exclusively by tension and not glue, it also meant that it was pretty hard to fit pieces together, and then run the LED through 60 cells. #IndicesOfTime

Now that I was excited about putting everything together, I realized that I screwed up - as I was contemplating the base layout between 6x10 and 5x12 I ended up designing 3D models for 6x12. 🤦‍♂️ Not that it was hard to change the models to remove an extra row, but it meant another 2 days of printing. But at last, it was ready #IndicesOfTime

Now that I could just plug the board into a random USB power adapter, and the LED strip into the board, the only remaining piece was software. Since I was relying on #ESPHome, it was just a matter of setting up my #HomeAssistant as a time-source and wiring a loop to switch LEDs every second. The only tricky part was translating indices to take into account LED strip being a single continuous sequence of lights arranged in a zigzag manner. #IndicesOfTime

While it seems to be as simple as connecting the LED strip to the ESP32 pins, apparently the common wisdom suggests including an extra capacitor and a resistor to stabilize voltage and current. As I wanted to err on the side of off the shelf components, I was delighted to find MagWLED-1 that took care of all those nuances. #IndicesOfTime

For the hardware, I knew I wanted to go with ESP32. It's ubiquitous and cheap. While I have some experience programming for it, my intent was to actually avoid need to do so thanks to the fantastic #ESPHome. It's surely an overkill for this project, but it would just take few dozen lines of YAML config and would give me Over-the-Air updates, logs and what not. So here I am, looking for a way to drive WS2182 with an ESP32 controller. #IndicesOfTime

And with that, I've got all of the pieces I need - and that's where I'm today. All in all, I've got 2 base segments, 3 grid segments, 60 number cutouts, 60 diffusers, and 60 enclosures, which together total at about 60 hours of print time on #Prusa Mini. And while that's under way, I've started looking into hardware and firmware aspect of the project so that the LEDs would actually blink. #IndicesOfTime

I did find one that fits, but that was unexpectedly hard. And my biggest worry is that it was the only thing of that kind I could find - all other WS2812 strips used much larger LEDs with bulkier cables which would've made it much more challenging to put together. I hope I wasn't searching good enough and there are plenty of similar LED on the market, but the only one I've found is this one https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQRFCK35 #IndicesOfTime

Actually, that took 5 weeks, not 6. I then had to face a challenge of how to slice the object into pieces such that I can print with #Prusa Mini's 180mm print area, so that I can then put it back together. That was another journey of its own, during which I learned that my intuition about how virtual object can come together in real world was completely off. Nevertheless, 1 Kg of of PLA filament later, I've got pieces to come together and hold even without glue. #IndicesOfTime

And while I'm glossing over it like it was no big deal, out of 7 weeks I've been working on it so far, 3D modeling took 6. It's pretty simple when you look at the end-result, but the way to get to it through countless unsuccessful attempts was quite grueling. I think the root cause here is my limited ability to think about objects in 3D space.Or maybe lack of Blender skills, or using a wrong tool for the job? Maybe it would've been easier in Fusion 360 if I knew how to use it. 🤔#IndicesOfTime