LED Flower Bouquet is a Radiant Hacker Desk Decoration
Jeremy Cook writes to us about a project of his; a bouquet of LED cube flowers. The flowers are PCB cubes made out of small castellated PCBs; each of those having an individually addressable LED in its center. Castellations hold the cubes together mechanically, and thanks to a cleverly chosen pinout; only two different kinds of PCB need to be ordered for building such a flower!
As a vase for these flowers, he decided to use a glass bottle; which would need a cutout to fit a ESP8266-powered NodeMCU board; a controller of choice for the project. After a few different approaches for cutting glass all resulted in the bottles cracking; he gave up on the “clean cut” idea and reused one of the broken bottles; gluing it back together well enough for the aesthetic to work.
Jeremy tells us that he’s had help from a hack we covered back in 2017; using a diode for level shifting, as the ESP8266’s 3.3 V level signals aren’t a good match for WS2812 inputs. From there, the WLED firmware for the ESP8266 ties everything together beautifully. It’s clear that [Jeremy] had a field day designing this, toying with all the ideas and approaches!
Read more: https://hackaday.com/2022/03/15/led-flower-bouquet-is-a-radiant-hacker-desk-decoration/
