Close

40 face dome draft

A project log for Colorb

Geodesic RGB hemisphere helping me wake up fresh

programagorprogramagor 08/12/2021 at 04:200 Comments

We modelled a geodesic dome in Blender, and found a continuous strip of triangles that doesn't intersect itself when laid out flat. The whole thing was designed to fit a Raspberry Pi Zero W, with room for powering it with a USB plug.

Plastic armature in white, Flex PCB in yellow

The circuit board was then designed from this shape, using KiCad. We also played with Eremex TopoR (topological autorouter) to get the shortest possible distance of traces conecting the LEDs.

Flex PCB with traces laid out

It is only now that we realised that most fab houses charge for rectangular space used. Clearly our design is very inefficient in this regard, being full of empty, wasted space. This realisation occurred only AFTER we sent the armature for printing, so here is what it might have looked like:


Discussions