ventilator / pexel

Penrose Sun

pexel

Playing around with penrose tilings, in particular P2, which consists of kites and darts

3D printed shapes, arranged in the penrose sun pattern, LED back light through laser cut acryl with a Raspberry Pi Pico and MicroPython

20 darts and 25 kites, slowly changing their base color, giving a nice, non distracting back ground mood setting, looked a bit like church window style, in the end

cycling through the color wheel every min (or so)

I built it just to explore the very nice Penrose pattern and tinker a bit with 3D-CAD & MicroPython. I learnt a lot in the process

Material

scaffolding

Brown-purple filament (Prusament PLA Mystic Brown)

backplane

currently open

LEDs

WS2813 (45 LEDs, single LEDs, kind of cheap even with the traditional stripe, just wires) - they take up very little space in this package variant

µController

Rasperry Pi Pico RP2040 USB cable

case RP

housing for the RP: Thingiverse Model

Assembly

The acrylic pieces should snap in, but on some shaped the retention pins broke of, so I used a bit of hot glue. There are slits for the LED wires from one compartment to the next

Code

RP2040 WS2812 demonstrator code, modified to the number of LEDs and the pattern I wanted

Kites and Darts

generated with Inkscape to reflect a Penrose tiling (P2) - Its just lines, rotated by 144° or 72° as needed

laser cut white semi transparent acrylic

Scaffolding

generated with Fusion360, design was a bit challenging for me but in general nothing too complex

Interesting part is the 3D Printing part:

• activate thin wall detection in Prusa Slicer
• one can get a nice front side effect by increasing the number of perimeter lines to 4 or 5, so the window bridges are all parallel

I printed a lot of discarded versions during the design phase (see evolution image above)

Assembly

Solder 3 wires to the RPi, pin 22, gnd and 5V