Your Mug Will Like This Glowy Coaster

-
laser cut acrylic coaster with rgb leds inside

[Charlyn] wanted to highlight their friends beautiful mug collection, so the Glowy Coaster was born.

The coaster is made up of six layers of laser cut acrylic. The top and bottom layer are cut out of clear acrylic, providing a flat surface for the coaster. A top pattern layer made of pearl acrylic has a thin piece of vellum put underneath it to provide diffusion for the LED strip sandwiched inside. The middle layers are made of peach acrylic and have their centers hollowed out to provide room for the electronics inside. The top pearl acrylic layer gives the coaster, as [Charlyn] writes, a “subtle touch of elegance”. The coaster itself is screwed together by an M3 screw at each point of the hexagon that feed through to heat-set inserts.

inside of glowy coaster with electronics exposed

The electronics consist of a short NeoPixel strip, cut to include 12 LEDs pointed in towards the center of the coaster. The LEDs are driven by a Trinket M0 microcontroller with a LiPo “backpack” to provide power, attachment points for the exposed power switch and recharging capability to the 110 mAh 3.7 V battery. The code is a slightly modified NeoPixel “rainbow” wheel loop (source available as a gist). The design files are available through Thingiverse.

Creations like these highlight how much care and work goes into a project with minimal beauty, where decisions, like the opacity and thickness of the acrylic or countersinking the M3 screws, can have huge consequences for the overall aesthetic. [Charlyn] has an attention to detail that brings an extra touch of professionalism and polish to the project.

Coasters are a favorite for laser cutting and we’ve covered many different types, including
coaster bots, coaster engravers and even a color changing, drink sensing coasters.



from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/ngwkWD2

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Modern Radio Receiver Architecture: From Regenerative to Direct Conversion

-
Image
Modern radio receivers have a distinct advantage over the common early designs which I covered in my previous article . Most of the receivers you will have worked with over the past couple decades are designs by Edwin Armstrong ; regenerative, superregenerative, or most commonly superheterodyne. These are distinguished by a few fascinating key traits that bring both benefits and drawbacks. Today let’s dive into Mr. Armstrong’s receivers. I’ll also talk about DC receivers which, despite the name, are not made to listen to batteries. These are receivers you are much more likely to encounter in modern equipment. Regenerative and Superregenerative The regenerative receiver is all about doing more with less. You still see some of these in simple applications like RF remote controls. The idea derives from how an oscillator works. In a simple way of thinking, an oscillator is an amplifier with enough positive feedback that any tiny signal at the right frequency will amplify and then, throu...
Get this one»

Hackaday Links: May 31, 2020

-
We begin with sad news indeed as we mark the passing of Marcel van Kervinck on Monday. The name might not ring a bell, but his project, the Gigatron TTL computer , certainly will. We did a deep dive on the microprocessor-less computer a while back, and Marcel was a regular at conferences and on the Gigatron forums, supporting users and extending what the computer can do. He was pretty candid about his health issues, and I’ll add that when I approached him a few weeks ago out of the blue about perhaps doing a Hack Chat about Gigatron, he was brutally honest about how little time he had left and that he wouldn’t make it that long. I was blown away by the grace and courage he displayed. His co-conspirator Walter Belger will carry on the Gigatron mission, including joining us for a Hack Chat on June 24. In the meantime, this might be a great time to pick up a Gigatron kit before they’re all sold out and get busy soldering all those delicious through-hole TTL chips. May of 2020 is the mo...
Get this one»

Homebrew 68K Micro-ATX Computer Runs Its Own OS

-
Image
We’re no stranger to home built Motorola 68000 computers here at Hackaday, but more often than not, they tend to be an experiment in retro minimalism. The venerable processor is usually joined by only a handful of components, and there’s an excellent chance they’ll have taken up residence on a piece of perfboard. Then [NotArtyom] sent in his Blitz , and launched the bar into the stratosphere. Make no mistake, the Blitz isn’t just some simple demo of classic chips. The open hardware motherboard has onboard floppy, IDE, and PS/2 interfaces, with a trio of 8-bit ISA expansion slots for good measure. The  Motorola 68030 CPU is humming along at 50 MHz, with 4 MB of RAM and 512 KB of ROM along for the ride. Designed to fit the Micro-ATX motherboard standard, you can even mount the Blitz in a contemporary PC case and run it on a standard ATX power supply. An earlier prototype of the Blitz motherboard. As if the hardware wasn’t impressive enough, [NotArtyom] went ahead and created hi...
Get this one»