Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Solder Many-Sided Light Up Shapes with BlinkyTile”.
My name is matt metz and um, i’m from i’m from the us, but actually i live in china. Right now. I live in guangzhou, um yeah, so right now, at the maker faire, we got this project that i’m super excited about. It’S called the blinky tile and the blinky tile is uh. Um is a construction kit for making your own led sculptures, so you can make something like these like nice, like light, um sort of like crystal pieces, um or you can make these like – really cool, like tight balls like geometric things that make shapes or anything from That to like just totally free-form, like cactus trees, sculptures anything like that.
So maybe we can come over and show you uh with our soldering patch here. So the tile the tile itself is um, is five-sided and um. It’S a this is a soldering kit. So um you solder it together to make the shape and basically there’s just like five connections on each side. You have to make and you pull them together and when you solder it, it makes both the mechanical and the electrical connection. So then, then, once you’ve got it soldered together, you’re ready to go, and these leds are not just normal leds, they’re uh, they’re, a digital led and they have a controller on each one and each one has its own address. So when you solder them all up, you’ve actually connected them, and then we use one like main controller to send data out to all of them. To like make a nice pattern over the whole tile. So you can make a really cool, like you know, like animated patterns or kind of like super subtle lighting effects, or anything like that. So these are like three examples of kind of things you can do with that. This is like what i call kind of like a tree structure like these pieces are coming out and um.
If you think of like pentagons, like normally people, think like really strong, rigid geometry like you’re thinking, like sort of like you know like triangles or like cool space shapes, and so you can see a bit of that here, where you see these uh, these kind of, Like this is half of a dodecahedron um, but then at the end here it starts to branch off into these like crazy, weird places and um that’s a little similar to like you know if you have uh crystals that don’t grow in a good like really clean Environment, they get these little like imperfections and they start breaking off in different directions. So this is kind of like an example of like what you would see a crystal kind of growing in the wild and just going crazy um, and this one we have over here. This is uh.
This is a much more like regular shape, so this is uh the the same, like it’s like a rigid crystal structure and um we’ve actually 3d printed. These little diffuser like plastic pyramids onto each one and um. These pieces can can pop off um, but the idea is that you can like, if you just have it like this, you have a really point source light, but to make it smoother, you can 3d print these little pieces on it um and we have all the Designs and stuff for this out on our on our website, um and then the one over there is uh a dojo keyboard.
Actually it’s similar to this other dodecahedron that we have here and the cool thing about this design is that it creates shadows. So if you have this, oh, if you have this in a dark room like if you have this in like a living room, you know when you have the lights down for a party or something like that. You can get some really sweet like awesome like tile. Like light effects going on and like this design is white and it’s kind of a disco ball, but you can actually put colors on it and make it slower, and then it creates like a really pleasing, like sort of elegant, elegant pattern, so um what we’re doing At this fair and um there’s a little back story to this um, but the basic idea is uh.
We wanted to show up, and we wanted to have people help us to make this structure so, rather than coming. You know with a bunch of stuff in a crate, put it out and just show it to people. The idea is, we actually came here and we just brought a bunch of tiles and some soldering equipment and everyone that comes by can join us and be a collaborator in this project and help it become bigger and bigger and bigger.
So we brought um 2100 of these little tiles and everyone that comes to visit us. Well, you should get a wristband, but everyone that comes to visit us can solder one or two tiles on and help us make a giant led, chandelier sculpture. So we’ve got this whole space here. We’Ve got a bunch of seed, sculptures and structures with some examples, and we would like everyone to come out and help us out and build something really amazing. So that’s what we’ve got if you like what you see here, we actually just launched our kickstarter this morning for the blinky tile um and we’re uh we’re kickstarting these these sets of leds.
So um you can get a basic kit which lets you make a dodecahedron ball um, you can get larger packs and you can get a huge pack. So if you want to make something um, it’s a great way to learn how to solder to practice your soldering skills, and you can make something that you really want to use and keep in your house. So we’re really excited about it.
We think you will be too so. Maker faire is like maker faire’s like a home. To me, i’ve been i’ve been going to the maker faire since uh. I missed the first one because i had to go a wedding and i’ve been to almost everyone since then, but i love the maker faire and um it’s great to see so many cool projects and every year it just keeps getting more and more exciting.
It’S super fun and i’m really glad to be here. .