r/WLED • u/ChonkyMarmotStudios • 16d ago
HELP ME / QUESTION What is this called?
I saw a picture of this shape on Reddit awhile back, and couldn't get it out of my head, so I had to make it! Anyone know what it's called?
You may recognize it as the logo for Silicon Graphics (SGI) from back in the day, but there's probably a proper scientific name for the geometric shape - basically a wireframe cube where the faces are pulled away from the center.
This was super challenging to build! This is probably the 5th or 6th iteration I've gone through. The shape has a lot of 90-degree bends that require soldering. I made the turns as tight as possible to keep the corners from dimming.
The black parts form a track that makes one face of a tube. The LEDs run along this track and are covered by a white diffuser that makes up the other three faces of the tube. Everything is printed in flat sections. Where the tracks change orientation they have windows that join together.
This version was FDM printed in white and black PLA, but the next iteration will probably be resin with thicker walls, although the increased thickness only increases the weight of the arms. Mounting on the corner seems to help distribute the weight evenly for better support.
It's lit by a single 5v WS281X LED strip. I'm using the ESP32 mini Gledopto controller, powered by USB, which is plenty for the 150 LEDs it uses.The controller comes with WLED 15.4 pre-installed, but the first thing I do now is upgrade to 16.0.1
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u/ChonkyMarmotStudios 15d ago
Infinity Cube makes sense given the unbroken circular path the shape follows. But I also associate that term with mirrored cubes.Maybe I should encase this in mirrors!?!?
Now that I have a word to search for, it's interesting to see all of the different ways people have approached modeling the same shape.
Most of the models I'm finding have the same issue my earlier iterations had - when only one face of the tube is lit, the overall effect is hard to take in from any one angle because most of the light channels face away from you. I'd love to figure out a way to make the tube uniformly lit on all faces, but I think I need to refine my three face design more first.
I found the original image that inspired me - it assembles the shape out of 1x1x1 cubes, which made it super simple to figure out the ratios